


The (un)Usual?

by rhysiana



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Diners, Basically No One Is Dead, Coffee and Calories as Signs of Affection, M/M, Magic!Stiles, Urban Fantasy (as opposed to horror), college!Stiles, meet cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-09-14 03:13:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 27,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9157738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhysiana/pseuds/rhysiana
Summary: Stiles works nights at the local college-town diner. Derek is the weird, taciturn new regular who apparently needs huge quantities of food in the middle of the night. Stiles is determined to figure out why.(Edit: And then it grew plot and chapters...)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maiNuoire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maiNuoire/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [Как (не)обычно?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14888141) by [Katrinos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katrinos/pseuds/Katrinos)



> A piece I wrote for maiNuoire* (poetry-protest-pornography) over on Tumblr to apologize for constantly infecting us both with headcanons and plot bunnies when we already have quite enough fic ideas, tyvm. This one started because of [this post](http://star-anise.tumblr.com/post/154634202084/theunvanquishedzims-werewolves-are-stereotyped) about how many calories werewolf transformations must burn, which ends in the line: "And filthy people showing up at Denny’s in the early morning are assumed to be hungover, so the ravenous beast idea is applied only to the wolf half." And I said, "What if Stiles worked in that diner..." 
> 
> *Credit to her for the title!

Just because Stiles needed a part-time job during college didn’t mean he had to like it. Sure, he’d been lucky enough to swing the late-night shift at the one actually good all-night diner near campus, which netted him both edible free food on his break and the time to do most of his homework during the lulls between customers, but honestly, the fact that he had to deal with customers at all was still a source of annoyance. Needless to say, he wasn’t exactly killing it on tips.

The door chimed. With a sigh, he took his highlighter out of his mouth and looked up. “Sit wherever, I’ll be with you in a sec,” he rattled off automatically before his brain caught up to his eyes. This dude looked… rough. Pale, unshaven, eyes bloodshot and exhausted, and currently glaring from under some seriously murderous eyebrows. Jesus. Stiles detoured to the serving station for the coffee pot, figuring he’d save himself a trip, because if this guy’s first priority wasn’t caffeine, well, it _should_ be. 

Of course the guy had chosen the table in the far back corner, because why would he do something convenient like sit somewhere close to the serving station or the kitchen or, you know, anywhere that might have been a little less work for Stiles? At least it seemed unlikely that he would be a talker, so Stiles could get some more actual work done.

He flipped the coffee mug in front of the guy upright as soon as he got to the table and started pouring. “You need a minute with the menu, or you know what you want?”

“Why don’t you tell me, since you apparently already know?” the guy retorted, cocking an eyebrow at the coffee.

Stiles waved a hand. “Please, I’ve never seen someone more in need of coffee in my life. Creamer and junk is right there. Now, what do you want?”

The guy looked like he was about to respond waspishly to that, too, but just then his stomach let out a loud gurgle and his jaw visibly clenched. Stiles smothered a laugh. The guy slapped open the menu, scanned quickly, and pointed at the biggest breakfast food combo they had. “This. All of it. And…” he pointed at the next one down, “this one too.”

“Seriously?”

The guy directed the murder brows his way again.

“Okay, okay! How do you want your eggs?”

“Don’t care.”

“Scrambled it is. Toast or biscuit?”

“Whatever’s faster.”

“Bacon or sausage?”

“Both.”

“Oh-kay. You want anything to drink besides coffee?”

“Orange juice.”

“Be right back.”

And that was how it started. He delivered the guy’s preposterous amount of food, retreated back to the host desk, and then proceeded to get nothing done because he was so distracted by watching a single human being eat that much all in one sitting. He may also have managed to note, on his trips back and forth to refill the guy’s coffee, that underneath all the exhaustion and grumpiness and definite dirt smudges on his jeans, the guy was hot. Way too built and casually fashionable to be transient, not overtly fashionable enough to have been out clubbing and now hungover, too old (probably) to be a college student… Stiles couldn’t figure him out, and things he couldn’t figure out bugged him.

Even worse, when the guy came up to pay, Stiles didn’t even get to get his name off his credit card so he could then ask Danny to do some advanced googling for him, because the guy paid in cash. And just grunted at him when Stiles asked (so politely!) if everything had been all right.

It was going to bug him for the rest of the night.

Dammit.

***

He came back. He came back often enough that Stiles started experimenting with refining his regular order of “all the food in this establishment, I don’t care, just bring it” and figured out, through careful study of grunts and eyebrows and once, he thought, maybe even a quarter of an actual smile, that the guy liked his eggs over easy, preferred biscuits to toast and sausage patties to links, would pick through the jam packets to pull out all the strawberry and never, ever touch the apple (which Stiles agreed with one hundred percent, who in their right mind liked apple jelly? gross), and took his coffee with cream and two sugars.

Stiles still didn’t know his name.

It was beginning to drive him a little nuts.

“Underground cage fighter,” he said as he filled up the guy’s coffee cup for the first time that night.

“What?” the guy said, eyebrows drawn down into Expression #17, Slight Confusion.

“I’m trying to figure you out, dude. How a person can eat so much and still be so jacked. And also apparently still starving. So that’s my guess. You’re an underground cage fighter. Yes or no?”

Stiles may have received, in return for this ridiculous statement, a whole third of a smile, though it looked involuntary. “No.”

“Too bad. Cage fighter-you was obviously very good, because you never come in here looking particularly beaten up. The usual?”

“Yeah.”

“You got it.”

***

“Bouncer for unsanctioned pop-up rave clubs.”

“No.”

***

“Night watchman at a secret government bioengineering lab.”

“No.”

***

“Twenty-four-hour emergency plumber.”

“No.”

Damn, there had been some fantasies attached to that one.

***

“Wilderness ultra marathoner,” Stiles guessed on a night when the guy turned up with more dirt than usual on his clothes.

There was a pause. “Is that even a thing?”

“Yeah! I watched a whole documentary about it! It looks insane.” He surveyed the guy critically for a second. “You’re right, though, you’ve got the wrong build for it.”

For this he received a raised eyebrow, so he retreated to the kitchen before he said anything else incriminating.

***

“Wilderness survival tour operator.”

“Is there a particular reason you’re now convinced I spend all my time in the woods?”

“I dunno, you’ve got this kind of sexy mountain man thing going on?” In Stiles’ defense, he’d had an exam that day and was functioning on even less sleep than usual, so his filter, patchy at the best of times, was basically nonexistent at this point. “And it would explain the dirt and the beard and the kind of weird schedule of when you show up and your desperate need for hot, buttered calories.”

The guy just stared at him in what Stiles became increasingly convinced was dismay, especially as his brain caught up and replayed what he had just said, so he ended that exchange by turning bright red, fleeing to the kitchen, and making Candace the dishwasher refill his coffee for the rest of the night.

***

The guy didn’t come in for two whole weeks after that, leaving Stiles miserably wondering if his propensity for foot-in-mouth had actually finally driven away a regular customer. To console himself, or maybe just torture himself, the line was thin here, he flipped to the back of his statistics notebook to look through all the notes he’d ever made about Mystery Guy. Because, yes, he’d been keeping notes.

When he looked at the dates of all the previous visits, he relaxed a little. Two weeks wasn’t actually that unusual. Sure, the guy had never gone a full two weeks without showing up, but his visits were definitely less frequent during this time period anyway.

This time… of the month.

He flipped the pages back and forth to check that he wasn’t making things up. Then he pulled out his phone and called up a moon phase chart for the current year and compared. And then he texted Scott. And felt like an idiot, though in his defense, he’d been really busy with the whole college thing and it wasn’t like he was in Beacon Hills anymore, though apparently he just needed to assume supernatural creatures really were everywhere. Cool. Worldview adjusted.

***

“Werewolf,” Stiles said with complete confidence as he poured the guy’s coffee a few nights later. The night of the full moon.

The guy blinked. “What?”

“Werewolf.”

“No. Seriously, you’re really reaching now. Is this all you got?”

“Dude, I’m not even guessing this time, I’m just telling you I know. Scott McCall from the Beacon Hills pack said to tell you hello and that I should assume you’re a Hale.”

The guy continued to sit there, apparently rendered speechless.

“I’m Stiles, by the way,” Stiles said, holding out his hand. “Sorry I didn’t realize sooner.”

“I, uh, Derek,” the guy, _Derek_ , replied, shaking the offered hand.

Stiles felt a sly grin spread across his face. “Nice to finally meet you, Derek. I think this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

Derek did not look reassured.

Stiles cackled all the way to the kitchen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swore up and down I wasn't going to start writing for a second fandom. "I don't have time!" I said. "I'm only going to watch a season or two of this show, max, just so I know who my friends are writing about," I said. And now here we are, with me caught up to the current season and writing fic. Dammit. So, uh, enjoy! I hope.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh, this was totally a one-shot meet cute, but then people wanted more, which was extremely flattering, and apparently flattery really will get you everywhere, so here, have a second part.
> 
> Edit: The lovely adara commissioned [fan art for this chapter](https://rhysiana.tumblr.com/post/175086915303/9timesoutoften-batwynn-a-commission-for) from the amazing batwynn! Go look!

Stiles filled Derek’s coffee cup as soon as he got to the booth, as usual, but this time he set the pot down on the table and slid into the seat across from Derek. Derek raised his eyebrows, the attempt to look shocked belied by the calm way he merely reached for his creamer and two sugar packets.

“Please. As if I didn’t turn your order into the kitchen while you were walking across the parking lot.”

“Oh? What if I wanted something different tonight?”

Stiles gave him a deeply skeptical look. “Because tonight is somehow magically different from every other night you’ve been in? Dude, if you’re going to tell me that all the hard work I’ve dedicated to refining your order for you over the past several months has been wasted because you _are_ actually willing to occasionally express a preference, I’m going to be very put out.”

Derek conceded the point (or so Stiles chose to interpret it) with the faintest quirk of his lips. “What do you want, Stiles?”

“Do you not consider the pleasure of your company reward enough?”

Derek rolled his eyes. “You’re at work, Stiles.”

Stiles looked exaggeratedly around the otherwise empty diner. “Yes, you’re right, you’re distracting me from my busy, busy night. Stop it, please, stop,” he said, deadpan.

Derek took a patient sip of his coffee.

Stiles grinned. “Okay, fine. What I really wanted to ask is if you’re free to be my backup tomorrow night.”

“Backup?”

“Yeah. There’s a kelpie in the pond on campus and it seems to be trying to lure TAs onto its back, so I’m gonna go deal with it. But Scott freaked out when I told him and said I had to ask you to back me up.” He shrugged. “It’s cool if you can’t, though, I can totally take care of it on my own.”

Derek’s eyebrows drew down into what Stiles had classified previously as a furrow of concern. “I can do it. Don’t go without me.”

“Awesome. Oh, hey, your order’s up!”

Derek’s hand shot out to grab Stiles’ wrist before he could completely untangle himself from the booth. “I mean it, Stiles. Wait for me tomorrow.”

Stiles looked down at his wrist in surprise. “Yeah, of course.”

Derek nodded and released him. Stiles found himself idly rubbing his wrist on his way to the kitchen window, as if to prolong the sensation.

He didn’t get a lot of homework done that night.

***

Stiles was utterly unsurprised when he exited his dorm and found Derek slouched against a lamppost, despite having belatedly realized on his way home the night before that he’d never told Derek where to meet him. Honestly, if anything, he was more shocked Derek wasn’t lurking in a shadow.

“Hey, stalker wolf, I see you found me.”

“What, like it’s hard?”

Stiles froze in the middle of the sidewalk. “Did you… did you just quote _Legally Blonde_ at me?”

Derek shrugged. “I have sisters. College campus. It worked.”

Stiles managed to restart his feet. “Oh my god, who _are_ you?”

Derek took that in the rhetorical spirit it had been intended, but when Stiles slanted a glance at him out of the corner of his eye, there was definitely a smirk. Crap.

Stiles cleared his throat. “The pond is this way.”

“I know,” Derek said, amused. “I am actually from around here.”

“Oh. Right.” Stiles could feel himself turning red. This was not a great start to his night of looking like a competent badass. Stupid Scott and his insistence on backup. “You shouldn’t go out in the middle of the night by yourself, Stiles,” he muttered under his breath, not caring if Derek heard. “It’s not safe,” like they didn’t do this all the time at home, he thought grumpily as he unbuttoned his cuffs and started rolling up his sleeves.

He came to a stop at the edge of the pond, carefully not letting his shoes touch the water. “Hey, kelpie!” he yelled.

Derek growled next to him. “Seriously? This was your plan?”

Stiles shrugged. “The direct approach usually works for me.”

“Uh-huh.”

The water in front of them started to churn, and a black horse with glowing red eyes and pondweed in its mane rose up out of it.

“Hello, human. Looking for a ride?” the horse said, with a distinctly suggestive tone.

“Well, yeah,” Stiles said easily, and from behind him came a noise suspiciously like Derek choking, “but not from you.” He rocked back on his heels, hands in his pockets.

“Are you _sure_?”

“Yup, pretty sure,” Stiles replied, now raising his forearms in front of himself and rotating them to make the tattoos clear. They shimmered ever so slightly in the moonlight.

The kelpie snorted. “Witch. What do you want?”

“Witch, emissary, whatever. What I want to know is why you keep trying to drown our TAs.”

The horse looked away. It seemed… embarrassed? “I’m bored and they have such interesting stories to tell.”

Stiles stared at him, then narrowed his eyes in exasperation. “Seriously? _Seriously_?” He threw up his hands. “You have a human form and you live on a college campus! Just go to their classes! You don’t have to try to lure them into the fucking pond!”

The horse blurred in front of him, becoming water again briefly before reshaping itself into a man. A naked man, with pondweed in his long dark hair. _Shapeshifters_ , Stiles thought, thankful he’d gotten mostly inured to random nudity interludes thanks to Malia.

“I can’t just… go to classes,” the man said, frowning. He gestured at his hair. “We were always told, they can recognize us by our weeds. We will be hunted and killed.”

“Look, I don’t know how old you actually are, but I’ve got some good news for you about how things work today. You’re on a college campus in California. No one, and I mean no one, is even going to look at you twice. They’ll just assume you’ve got some funky dreads. Embrace surfer chic, you’ll be fine.”

The kelpie was starting to look hopeful but was clearly still unsure. He looked to Derek for reassurance, and Stiles turned to find Derek, wolfed out just enough to make it clear what he was, staring at him in disbelief.

“What?” Stiles asked, annoyed. Some backup Derek was.

“Does he tell the truth?” the kelpie asked.

Derek blinked and shifted his attention to the kelpie. “Uh, yeah. He’s right, that should actually work. If you really want to blend in, you should consider officially enrolling as a student. Then no one can question your presence in any of the classes.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. My sister went here. We can help you get all the right fake human paperwork.”

“See? Not even the first shapeshifter on campus. Probably not even the only one currently attending, but I don’t like to ask. You know, as long as nobody’s trying to _eat_ anyone else.”

The kelpie looked down again. “Sorry about that. I wasn’t really going to eat them, I swear.”

Stiles gave him his most severe look. “Uh-huh. Look, I work nights at the diner over on 5th, so if you want to come talk about making a plan for all this, just stop in. But, like, you know,” he waved a hand in the kelpie’s general direction, “clothed.”

The kelpie looked affronted. “I have clothes! Just not _here_.”

“Cool, cool. So, like I said, the diner. I’m usually there any nights except Tuesdays and Wednesdays. You can come borrow my textbooks or whatever, just as long as you don’t try to take any more TAs.”

“Yeah, I got that part,” the kelpie said with annoyance, and splashed back into water.

Stiles blinked at the abrupt exit. “Rude much?”

Derek snorted. “You didn’t have to reemphasize the whole ‘don’t eat TAs’ thing.”

“It seemed like the most important part!” Stiles said, starting back down the path toward his dorm.

“And he was already embarrassed about it.”

“Yeah, well,” Stiles muttered. Then he brightened, bouncing a little. “But overall, it went pretty well, yeah? I’m totally gonna tell Scott I didn’t need backup.”

Derek grabbed his arm, dragging him to a stop.

“Whoa, what the hell, dude?”

Derek looked at him intently, eyes glowing faintly again. “No. Promise me. Don’t go try to handle these things on your own.”

Stiles yanked his arm away, pointing at the tattoos. “Hello! I can handle myself.”

“I’m not doubting your abilities. You did… better tonight than I expected,” Derek said, sounding like it pained him to admit it.

Stiles preened. He couldn’t help it.

“But you’re away from your pack. This is my family’s territory.” He held his hand up before Stiles could bristle. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t be protecting people here. You’re an emissary, you can’t really help it. But it’s my family’s duty to offer you assistance. It would be a failure on our parts if anything happened to you. I don’t want to have to be the one to explain that to Alpha McCall.”

Stiles snorted with laughter. “Oh my god, ‘Alpha McCall.’ I have got to tell Scott you called him that.”

Derek’s eyes narrowed. “It’s his title.”

Stiles waved his hand and wiped at his eyes. “I know, it’s just so weird. I’ve known him since we were four. That makes him sound like he has so much more of a clue than he actually does.”

“What, like you?” Derek asked with a smirk.

Stiles gave him a sour glance. “Yeah, well, our pack may be young, but we’ve done okay.”

Derek nodded. “I know. I asked our emissary about you after you introduced yourself in the diner.” He smiled at Stiles then, a real smile, not the quarter or half smiles Stiles had been cataloguing up to now.

Stiles was completely unprepared. All he could do was blink.

Derek took a breath. “I actually wanted to ask, do you want to go get coffee maybe?”

“Dude, I serve you coffee all the time.”

Derek rolled his eyes. “No, I mean, like, tomorrow? You said it’s your other night off. Do you want to go get coffee with me? Somewhere other than the diner?”

“You mean… like a date?”

Derek’s eyebrows drew down again slightly, to Stiles’ dismay. “Well, yes. I mean, it doesn’t have to be, if you don’t want. I just didn’t want to ask you out before, when you were at work. It’s rude.”

“I want! I want! Oh my god, I want,” Stiles hastened to assure him. “I was just checking that you meant with me.”

The eyebrows twitched again, this time in annoyed surprise. “Yes, of course with you. Who else do you see here for me to be asking out?”

Stiles grinned. “Awesome! Although this does mean you’re finally going to have to actually carry on a conversation with me. Maybe actually reveal details about your personal life. I mean, I can carry on multiple sides of a conversation if I have to…”

Derek just smiled slightly, watching Stiles ramble and wave his hands as he sidetracked himself onto a tangent.

“Well, whatever happens,” he said when Stiles finally paused once they reached his dorm again, wondering how he’d gotten to the end of a story about pixies trying to colonize the Nemeton, “I’m at least confident I’ll never be bored.”

“Oh,” Stiles said, suddenly not at all sure that Derek was the one in trouble here after all. He had a real weakness for people who actually listened to him like he was interesting.

“Good night, Stiles. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Derek said over his shoulder as he sauntered off into the night, and yes, did the annoying werewolf thing of seeming to disappear into a shadow.

Yeah, Stiles was in trouble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonus phone call between Scott and Stiles a few minutes later:
> 
>  **Scott:** So how'd it go?
> 
>  **Stiles:** Cakewalk. The backup was totally unnecessary.
> 
>  **Scott, concerned:** But Derek was there, right?
> 
>  **Stiles:** Yes, _mom_! God, I told you I would ask him... He, uh, he asked me out.
> 
>  **Scott:** YES! But dammit, now I owe Lydia $20.
> 
>  **Stiles:** What.
> 
>  **Scott:** She said you were totally crushing on Derek and I should do the whole backup thing to get you two out of the diner. How she knew Derek would ask you out, I don't know. But Lydia's always right.
> 
>  **Stiles:** ... I hate you both.
> 
>  **Scott:** You do not. You have a date now. You love us.
> 
>  **Stiles:** I do. I have a date, Scotty. A DATE.
> 
> *45 minutes of rambling about Derek's eyes and his butt and how he said Stiles was more competent than he expected*
> 
> *Scott sits there and takes it because of all the times Stiles had to listen to him talk about Allison*


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this took longer to write than I thought! Turns out writing a first date is kind of odd for a person who has consistently managed to always end up dating someone they've already known for years, at which point a date is no different than going to dinner, except now there may be kissing. Also, I had to make actual decisions about their AU backgrounds and stuff, now that this is turning into a real fic. I hope you're all happy. Bonus: Derek's POV this time!

“Oh my god, you’re smiling,” Laura said as Derek came in and dropped his keys on the table by the door.

Derek rolled his eyes. “I smile.”

“So how was Diner Guy?” she asked, voice going obnoxiously sing-song.

“He was with Diner Guy?!” Cora’s voiced echoed excitedly from the laptop on the coffee table in front of Laura.

“Oh god, you’re on Skype. Of course.” He would never escape both his sisters being overly invested in his love life, never. “ _Stiles_ is fine.”

“Like, fine or _fiiiiine_?” Cora asked.

Derek flopped down on his usual end of the couch, resigning himself to the conversation. “The first one, thank you very much.”

“Liar. Lydia showed me photos.”

“I hate you all. California is not a small state, how exactly did you end up in the same class at the same university as one of his best friends?”

“The universe loves us and hates you,” Laura said smugly. “Now spill.”

“I was his backup while he dealt with a kelpie in the university pond. Everything went fine, he went back to his dorm, I came home. The end.”

Laura kicked him in the thigh. Cora appeared to be trying to incinerate him with the power of her mind via the internet.

He let his head fall back on the cushions of the couch and grinned at the ceiling. “And I asked him out.”

Cora whooped and Laura punched first the air and then his shoulder in celebration.

“Ow,” he muttered, rubbing at it.

“Shake it off, you big baby,” she replied. “So what did he do with the kelpie? Hex it to confine it to the pond? Compel it to move to a new territory? What? I heard his magic was pretty good.”

Derek snorted. “Uh, no. He, well, he figured out it was just bored and told it to attend classes like a normal person.”

“He what?”

“Yeah, exactly. Incidentally, we need to forge some new student paperwork.”

“Huh. I can’t decide if that’s genius or just annoying.”

“Pretty much,” Derek confirmed. And he liked it.

***

What Derek did not like was picking out clothes for a date. Or rather, the nervousness that was making picking out clothes suddenly difficult. This was stupid. He called Erica.

“You’re being stupid,” she said.

“I _know_ ,” he growled.

“He’s already seen you! For months! All middle-of-the-night, post-run you, too. This isn’t even a first impressions thing. If you pick something that doesn’t have dirt on it, it’ll be a step up.”

“Are you going to help me or not?”

Her eyeroll was somehow audible. “Your new jeans and the purple Henley. Was that really so hard?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said firmly before shifting to sly. “So when do we get to meet him?”

Derek side-eyed his phone in horror. “God, never.”

“Nope, unacceptable, Isaac and I are befriending him immediately, I’ve decided.”

“No!”

“Yes! Looking him up in the campus directory now. Byeeeeee!” she sang as she hung up.

“Dammit,” Derek muttered. “I need better friends.”

***

And thus, armored in his Erica-approved outfit, he set out to meet Stiles in front of his dorm again. He told himself not to be nervous. He already knew Stiles liked him. They knew each other already. (Kind of.) The act of dating was not some dragon he needed to slay.

And in wondering whether, or rather, how much Stiles would laugh at that absurd metaphor, he felt himself relax.

Maybe this would be okay.

Stiles was waiting for him outside the building, shifting from foot to foot and typing quickly on his phone, eyes darting up anytime someone passed near him. He grinned and straightened up as soon as he saw Derek, shoving his phone into his back pocket. As Derek got closer, Stiles ran an appreciative eye over him and actually whistled. “Lookin’ _good_ ,” he said.

Derek refused to blush. (He hoped his beard hid it.) Instead, he raised an eyebrow. “You’re not going to run off and refuse to talk to me the rest of the night because you complimented my appearance, are you?”

“Hey now!” Stiles said as they started toward the coffee shop. “I’ll have you know I was operating under extreme sleep deprivation that night and I will not be held responsible for my actions. But _now_ ,” and here he slanted a smug sideways look at Derek, “now you have officially asked me out, so it is compliment open season.”

Derek was fairly certain no one had ever threatened to compliment him before.

Stiles looked distressingly gleeful about this prospect.

“You look nice, too,” he said, falling back onto dating cliché and politeness reflexively. Besides, it was true.

Stiles scoffed. “Please, I feel positively underdressed next to your _you_ ness.”

Derek decided the best way to deal with the complimenting was to just ignore it. Yes, this was a good plan. He looked over at Stiles. “So you’re telling me you didn’t put a lot of thought into which t-shirt to wear tonight?”

Stiles flushed slightly, but laughed. “Oh, no, dude, I totally did. But I always pick the Hawkeye bulls-eye shirt when I want to remind myself I’m awesome.”

Derek failed to repress a smile, and that was all that was needed to set Stiles off on an enthusiastic soliloquy on the merits of human members of supernatural crime-fighting teams. It was the most entertained Derek had been in days, and he wondered if Stiles realized how much he was saying about himself at the same time.

The comic book lecture took them all the way to the coffee shop, Stiles blinking and coming to a stop when Derek held the door open for him. “We’re here. I’ve been talking a lot. I talk a lot when I’m nervous. Not that you make me nervous!” he said, hands gesturing emphatically. “I’m just…”

Derek caught one of the flying hands and leaned in close to Stiles’ ear. “I don’t mind. I like it.” Stiles shivered and Derek grinned. “But maybe we should order first before the next topic.”

Stiles swallowed. “Uh, yeah. Ordering’s good. We should order. Yes. That is a thing that we should do.”

Derek propelled him to the counter with a hand in the small of his back. There was no one in front of them, 8:30pm apparently not being much of a coffee rush hour for normal people. Derek nudged Stiles to order first, then watched with a fondness that was frankly kind of alarming as Stiles smiled easily at the barista, flirting casually in a way Derek could tell was ingrained habit. He only barely remembered to place his own order.

They collected their drinks and then found a table in the corner, at which point Derek realized his innocent and low-pressure suggestion of coffee was going to bite him in the ass, because whatever it was Stiles had ordered was iced. And therefore had a straw. Was he even _aware_ of the way he was playing with it?

 _Down, boy_ , he told himself. This was their first date, for goodness sake. He shifted and cleared his throat. “What in world is that?”

Stiles looked down at his drink in surprise. “Have you really not had a Milky Way here before? It’s the best! It’s got chocolate and caramel to taste like the candy bar, plus whipped cream. And three shots. Well, you can get more, but this one has three. Tonight.”

His leg was bouncing under the table. Unsurprisingly.

Derek raised an eyebrow. “Do you ever sleep?”

“I mean, not a lot. But, dude, this is the first time we’ve even seen each other before midnight! Surely you knew I didn’t do much of my sleeping at night.”

Derek had to concede the point.

“So…” Stiles said, sitting back in his chair, a distinct gleam in his eye. “I’ve been restraining myself like mad, dude, you have no idea, and didn’t do a Google deep dive on you.”

Derek blinked at that, honestly surprised. “You didn’t?”

“Nope. Don’t get me wrong, I was going to. My friend Danny is a computer wizard and can find out anything about anyone. I was totally gonna get him to look you up when you first started coming to the diner, but you kept paying in cash, so I could never get your name.”

Derek felt his lips twitch up at that. He hadn’t even been trying to be particularly mysterious.

Stiles pointed at him. “Shut it! I hate mysteries. They _niggle_ at me until I figured them out.”

“Really,” Derek said dryly. “I never would have guessed.”

Stiles glared at him as he did something obscene to his straw again. “Anyway,” he said after he swallowed, “by the time I finally learned your name, it seemed like you valued your privacy too much for me to do it in good conscience anymore. So I just asked Scott for gossip instead.” He grinned.

Derek rolled his eyes. “I appreciate your restraint. But it’s clearly killing you. Just ask whatever you want to know.” He made a go-ahead gesture.

“Awesome! Okay, first, what do you do? When you’re not running around in the woods all wolfy in the middle of the night?”

“Translation services.”

Stiles’ eyes widened.

Derek wasn’t smirking at Stiles' surprise. He wasn’t.

Stiles adjusted quickly. “Dude, seriously? That’s awesome! What languages?”

“Uh, a bunch. Our mom is kind of a werewolf negotiator, so I do a lot of treaties and agreements.”

Stiles was practically vibrating in his chair now. “My friend Lydia and I have been doing our own spell translation project. Could I ask for your help sometime? She honestly does most of the translation and then I’m the one who figures out how the magic is supposed to work, but could I, like, ask you for some spot-checking of interpretations? I mean, I haven’t blown myself up yet, so we must be doing a pretty good job, but still… Why are you making that face? Why do you look like you know what I’m talking about already?”

Instead of answering directly, Derek said, “I have two sisters, you know. The younger one is your age.”

Stiles caught on quickly. “And the older one is the one who went to university here, like you told the kelpie. So where’s the younger…” His eyes narrowed. “What’s her name?”

“Cora,” Derek said, face carefully straight.

Stiles collapsed back in his chair. “Are you fucking with me? Your sister is Lydia’s new _roommate_? How… what… the universe is screwing with me.” He sat straight up again. “And she cheated! She had insider information on that bet with Scott. I should rat her out and make her give the money back, but honestly, that’s my girl.”

Derek smiled down at his coffee. The affectionate irritation in Stiles’ voice when he talked about his friends was, well, familiar.

He looked up again, a more serious question occurring to him. “Why are you and Lydia doing this, though? Magic doesn’t seem like a great thing for self-study.”

Stiles’ lips twisted into something complicated. Frustration? Distaste? Self-deprecation? “Our… supposed mentor was always more interested in being cryptic than actually teaching us anything. Lydia and I eventually got tired of feeling like the weak links.” He shrugged. “We were always doing the research for the pack anyway. Worked out. I don’t think Deaton knew a lot about banshee powers anyway. And the only thing he ever told me I could do was activate mountain ash.”

Derek’s breath caught at the mention of Deaton, but he covered it by taking a sip. He didn’t think Stiles noticed. He made a note to talk to his mother about it. Later. This was a date, after all.

“So what are you majoring in?”

And just like that, Stiles was off, talking enthusiastically about the courses he was taking in Folklore Studies, which then led to some of the weirder stories he’d found reference to and tracked down, which inevitably made him need to pull an all-nighter for the paper he had been supposed to be working on but got distracted from. Tangent led into tangent, and his hands moved the whole time, and Derek was fascinated. He allowed himself to relax into Stiles’ river of words, especially since Stiles didn’t seem to think he was too quiet. It all just felt… natural.

They were still sitting there when the coffee shop started to close up at 2am.

“Oh,” Stiles said, blinking as he fully took in the fact that everyone else was gone. “Oh my god, I can’t believe we’ve been here so long.” His face reddened. “Did I talk your ear off? I’m sorry. You should have said something.”

Derek caught his hand and pulled him up, tugging him toward the door so they could get out of the way of the staff. “Like I said when we got here, I don’t mind. I like it when you talk.”

“Yeah, but you said that back when I’d only been talking for twenty minutes, not five hours!”

Derek laced their fingers together firmly and started them back toward Stiles’ dorm. “Still don’t mind.”

Stiles looked down at their hands, then straight into Derek’s eyes, as if searching for sincerity. Then he grinned. “Oh my god,” he breathed. “You’re perfect.”

Derek snorted. “Tell that to my sisters.”

“So…” Stiles said when they were back at the door to his building once again. “Do you want to do that again sometime?”

“Yeah, I really do,” Derek said, leaning in. “And I’m going to kiss you now, if that’s okay.”

“So okay. So very okay,” Stiles said. And then he wasn’t really able to talk. For a while. Because one kiss was good, but two was better. Who knew how long they would have stood there, full-on making out against the wall, if some other student hadn’t ostentatiously cleared their throat and demanded access to the card reader by the door.

Stiles burst out laughing and hid his face against Derek’s shoulder. “I swear I think I’m dreaming. There is no way this is actually my life.”

Derek pinched him lightly on the ribs, causing Stiles to gasp and jolt against him in a more distracting way than he’d intended. Trouble, trouble, he was in so much trouble.

Stiles smacked him on the shoulder. “What was that for?”

Derek smirked. “Just proving to you that you’re not dreaming.” He leaned in for one more kiss. “But I really should go now. I’ll see you at the diner tomorrow, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Stiles repeated faintly.

Derek waited until Stiles managed to fumble his keycard out and get safely into the dorm, then headed home. He was in for the most obnoxious interrogation from Laura when he got there, and he didn’t care at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A text conversation between Stiles and Derek the next day:
> 
>  **Stiles:** Why have I just been accosted by two curly blondes and their silent shadow?
> 
>  **Derek:** They roped Boyd into it, too? I'm so sorry, you're on your own.
> 
>  **Stiles:** Wait, what? What is going on?
> 
>  **Stiles:** Derek
> 
>  **Stiles:** Derek
> 
>  **Stiles:** Erica scares me, Derek. I thought you liked me...
> 
>  **Stiles:** I changed my mind. Erica is the best.
> 
>  **Derek:** Oh god.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back to the diner! This chapter turns out to be mostly worldbuilding via fluff and pack feels, but we might finally be developing some semblance of a larger plot. Maybe. (WIPs are wild, aren't they? If there's a thing you really want to see, leave a comment, because the outline I'm working off of here is vague in the extreme. This is the opposite of my usual process, so hey! Audience participation opportunities!)

“You cheated,” Stiles said, pointing his pen accusingly at his computer screen.

On the other end of the video chat, Lydia continued to calmly brush her hair, not even looking at him. “I didn’t cheat," she sniffed. “I just went into the bet with a more thorough understanding of the situation.”

“Okay, fair,” Stiles acknowledged. That was basically their role in life anyway. “But still. You live with his _sister_. And you didn’t even tell me!”

“Oh, now we get to your real issue.”

“No! …Well, yes. How could you not tell me you knew who he was?”

“This was more fun.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Uh-huh. I still say you owe Scott dinner next time the pack goes out.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said as she tossed her hair over her shoulder and finally turned toward the camera. “Now, what did you think about that Old French document we found? Anything real there?”

“Oh, yeah, it looks like a variant of the Latin text we found for casting light.”

“Mm-hmm,” she said, making notes. “So do you think it’s an anybody spell, a spark thing, or something that can be turned into a rune?”

He drummed his pen on the desk as he thought. “Not sure yet. Let me play with it for a few days. If it can be runed, do you even want it?”

“For light?” She tilted her head. “No, I don’t think so. It’d have to go on my wrist to be useful, and my purse is plenty big enough for a flashlight, thank you. I’ll save my valuable wrist real estate for something else.”

He snorted. The longer they did this, the more terrifying the contents of Lydia’s purse got. “A flashlight is so tame for you.”

“Allison gave it to me. UV.”

“Ooooh.” A pause. “Can you get me one?”

“I suspect everyone’s getting one this summer in Chris’s next wave of ‘things the kids need at college’ boxes.”

“Such a dad.”

“Okay, gotta go. Study session to lead.”

“Have fun terrifying the plebes!”

***

Stiles was suddenly very glad he’d actually managed to finish all his homework for the next day before his shift, because the diner was being invaded.

He’d known Derek planned to show up tonight, but apparently Erica had been quite serious about adopting him when she pounced on him between classes earlier. “Stilinksi!” she crowed, throwing an arm around him and kissing his cheek as she came around to his side of the host station and stole some menus.

Derek shot him an apologetic glance over her head and Stiles rubbed at his cheek. Sure enough, his fingers came away lipstick red.

“She reapplied just before we came in,” Isaac confirmed.

“Of course she did,” Stiles muttered. “Go sit,” he said to the group, waving a hand vaguely in the direction of Derek’s usual table as he detoured to get the coffee pot.

The booth looked cheerfully crowded as Stiles approached this time, rather than isolated and vaguely shadowy. Derek was in his corner seat, but Isaac sat next to him, bright-eyed and interested in everything, and Derek looked more relaxed than Stiles had ever seen him. Boyd, seated across from Derek with an arm across the back of the bench and Erica by his side, gave a not-unfriendly nod as Stiles distributed his handful of extra mugs. Erica just gave a toothy grin. Stiles was starting to get used to it. Kind of.

He set the coffee pot down on the edge of the table and surveyed them. “Okay, I can’t be bothered to be constantly refilling coffees all night for you lot, so gimme the salt,” Stiles said, hand out. Derek handed it to him with a questioning glance. Stiles tried not to let his answering smile get too smug, but he was about to show off, and this was _cool_ , dammit.

First he licked a finger and drew a rune on the clear section at the head of the table. Isaac wrinkled his nose, but Stiles was the one who had cleaned the table in the first place, so he just wrinkled his nose back. Then he poured some salt into the palm of one hand and tossed it in the air, snapping his fingers as it fell. It settled into a perfect circle around the rune, just the right size for the base of the coffee pot. He settled it on top and dusted off his hands. “There, now it’ll stay hot.”

“Nice,” breathed Erica, holding up a hand. He high-fived her.

Derek just raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t this what they make thermoses for?” And then he jolted like he had gotten kicked in the shin under the table.

Erica smiled sweetly at him. “Shut up, Derek, your boyfriend is being awesome.”

Derek turned red.

Stiles loved Erica.

“All right, I know what _he_ wants, so what about the rest of you?”

Isaac looked up. “You know what he wants? Does he get the same thing every time? What’s his order? We need to know. For science.”

Derek shoved him half out of the booth. Isaac just snickered.

“Well, his usual order mostly amounts to ‘all the food the kitchen has on hand,’ so you’d better hurry up and make your own decisions or there won’t be anything left. Drinks?” he asked, holding a pen over his order pad pointedly.

Derek settled comfortably back into his corner with a small, satisfied smile.

***

It was true; orders for four werewolves did put a bit of a strain on the lone cook who worked the overnight shift. And it definitely required some interesting table Tetris to fit all the plates when everything was ready.

For the sake of appearances, since he _was_ at work, Stiles retreated back to the host station until there were enough empty plates that he could justify bussing, but by the time all the plates had been cleared and he’d fetched another completely full pot of coffee, he gave in and just dragged a chair over to sit on backwards at the end of the table.

“Move, Isaac, let Stiles sit next to Derek,” Erica insisted.

“Nah,” Stiles said, waving Isaac back into his seat. “I have to be able to get up in the unlikely event someone else comes in.”

Erica pouted and Derek looked faintly relieved, at which Stiles gathered there would have been pictures. Not that Stiles was opposed to that, in theory, but Erica was a little terrifying in her enthusiasm at the idea of Derek dating. He was distracted from chasing that thought down, though, when Boyd finally spoke.

“So, Stiles, do you want to be on the campus patrol rotation?”

Stiles blinked. “There is one?”

Boyd gave him an unimpressed look. “Of course.”

“No, I mean, that makes sense! I was just surprised I hadn’t heard about it before now.”

Boyd shrugged. “Must not have been paying attention.”

Stiles remembered the sudden mental shift he’d done when he figured out what Derek was and realized werewolves were common outside of Beacon Hills. “Yeah, okay,” he admitted. The idea he hadn’t been paying attention rankled, but whatever. He’d just been so happy to try to be a (mostly) normal college student. For a while, at least. This was better. He’d missed being around a pack more than he’d thought.

“Send me your schedule and I’ll work you in,” Boyd said, like that was that. Stiles felt weirdly warm at being so readily accepted. Derek caught his eyes and smiled at him, and Stiles could feel his ears heating up. He ducked his head, embarrassed at being so pleased.

Erica distracted him by poking at his forearm. “So what are all these? I know emissaries have tattoos, but these look totally different than the ones ours has.”

Stiles looked down, realizing he’d rolled up his sleeves without thinking. “Well, they’re basically the same thing. They’re all magical shortcuts. But Lydia and I figured all these out ourselves, so they’re not really the same as traditional runes.”

“Cool,” Erica said, tracing a few of the knotwork-based ones with a fingernail. Stiles obligingly turned his arm for her, smiling at her fascination until he caught Derek frowning.

“They’re all thoroughly tested,” he said defensively. “I don’t get any of them permanently inked until we know it works reliably every time, and that runing is actually more efficient than just casting the spell. Sometimes it’s not.”

“Stiles,” Derek said, cutting off his flood of words. Erica’s nail had frozen in place on his arm. “It’s fine. I wasn’t doubting your knowledge of magic. I just… you mentioned your mentor last night, and I was remembering I need to talk to you about him.”

“Who, Deaton?” Stiles asked in surprise.

“Yeah.”

Now everyone at the table was looking at Derek. He looked far less relaxed.

“Who’s Deaton?” Isaac asked.

Derek let out a prolonged sigh and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “He used to be my mother’s emissary.”

“He _what_?” Stiles exclaimed. Isaac, Erica, and Boyd just looked confused.

“Yeah. And from what you’ve said, something is… not right.”

Stiles crossed his arms on the back of his chair and stared down at the table silently. “Huh,” he said finally. When he looked up, Derek was looking at him with concern. Stiles responded with a “what can you do?” shrug. “I guess that explains some things. But it’s not like we knew any better.”

Derek’s face did something complicated, and Stiles glared at him. “No. Stop it. It’s not your fault, and you know it. You didn’t even know our pack was there, let alone had any connection to Deaton.”

Derek frowned. “Doesn’t mean I— _we_ shouldn’t do something about it now.”

Erica looked at her watch. “Oh, hey, look at the time! Those of us with morning classes should probably go.”

Stiles stood and put his chair back at its table as the others scooted out of the booth, pooling bills to leave an outrageous tip (which Stiles figured was more than fair; the cook definitely deserved it.)

“See you tomorrow, Stiles!” Erica said with a little finger wave. Boyd shepherded her and Isaac out the door after exchanging nods with Derek.

Apparently paying for four outrageous meals rather than just one was what it took for Derek to decide to use his credit card, Stiles noted. Derek caught his hand as he gave the card back. “Stiles,” he said quietly. “I really wasn’t trying to criticize you. Or your pack. You’ve clearly been handling yourselves quite well without my help or opinions before this.” He squeezed Stiles’ hand for emphasis, and Stiles felt himself relax a little. “But I am serious about needing to fix it, if we can. Deaton isn’t our emissary anymore, but he’s still a Hale responsibility. Or should be. I need to talk to my mom about this, but would you be willing to meet with her?”

“I, uh, yeah,” Stiles said, taken aback by Derek’s gravity.

“Good.” And then Derek smiled at him, soft and sweet and so damn caring that Stiles just knew he would have started babbling out of discomfort if Derek hadn’t drawn him into a quick kiss over the cash register.

“Good night, Stiles.”

“Night, Derek…”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the unintended pause in updates there; my brain got hijacked by the sudden need to write [8k of photographer Derek taking Stiles camping in Yosemite](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10074152), so you can check that out if so inclined. I swear I will get the next chapter out sooner!
> 
> I was inspired to get back to work and get this chapter up, though, because the lovely storiesfromtheden made [an aesthetic board for this fic](http://rhysiana.tumblr.com/post/158181647828/storiesfromtheden-stiles-flushed-slightly-but)! I love it.

“Talia Hale.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Oh, Derek! I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t even check the ID to see who was calling.” He could hear her shuffling papers in the background. “I don’t… Did I send you something? I didn’t think I had anything with you for translation right now, but we’ve been so busy, anything seems possible.”

“No, Mom, you’re fine, you didn’t forget anything.” He sat back in his desk chair and squinted at the calendar. “Where are you right now anyway?”

“Ummm, Germany, I think. Austria? I suppose it could be Switzerland, but their hotel rooms usually have more French. We just got here last night and haven’t even left the room yet. I’m so ready for these talks to be over. We really need to think of a way to set up some sort of conference center on neutral ground. I’m getting too old for all this traveling from territory to territory.”

Derek snorted. “Liar. You love it.”

She sighed. “Well, maybe. But a neutral meeting place would still be much more convenient. And then we wouldn’t have to worry about the airlines losing some key treaty or a hospitality gift or something.”

Derek leaned forward and made a note to start looking into it. He should be able to tell her if it was a viable solution by the time she got home.

“But I’m sure that’s not why you called, sweetheart. Is anything wrong?”

“I… don’t really know. Have you heard anything from Alan Deaton recently?”

“Alan? No. I don’t actually think I’ve heard from him in years. He hasn’t seemed to want to have much to do with us since…”

Derek cleared his throat and shifted. “Well, have you heard anything _about_ him, if not from him directly?”

“Not anything that stuck out to me. Why, Derek? What’s going on?”

“It’s nothing urgent. It might be nothing, I guess.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“No, I don’t. Did you know he’s been advising the McCall pack? In Beacon Hills?”

“Has he? Well, I guess that’s good, that he feels comfortable enough to take on a new pack.”

“I don’t really get the impression that’s what’s going on here.”

“What do you mean?”

“From what the member of their pack I met here has told me, the advice he’s been giving has been… questionable at best.”

“How do you mean?”

“Their spark and a banshee member have been teaching themselves magic out of whatever scavenged materials they can find because they were tired of almost dying all the time, is the explanation I got.”

“They _what_?”

“Yeah. I think something’s really wrong down there. Do you want me to go?”

“No, honey, no. We’ll be home by the end of the week. I’ll get your father to look into it as much as he can while I’m in all these damn meetings and we’ll try to piece together a bigger picture. I don’t want you or Laura going into Beacon Hills by yourself.”

“Okay, Mom. I promise. Good luck with your meetings.”

“Thanks, sweetie. We’ll see you soon.”

***

Stiles had been planning to study. He really had. He had the stack of books next to him to prove it. But when he settled down under the tree at the edge of the quad, he somehow accreted three werewolves in under thirty minutes. Erica was lying on the grass next to him with her head pillowed on his thigh, while Isaac had somehow managed to subtly insinuate himself between the tree trunk and Stiles so Stiles was now leaning more on Isaac’s shoulder than the tree itself. Boyd, of course, had brought his own folding chair and appeared for all the world to be ignoring the rest of them while he actually got some class reading done, but Stiles didn’t miss the way he smiled, very small and without looking up, whenever Erica ran her toes up the back of his calf.

“…and then he tried to relate his answer to Che Guevara _again_. It’s a fucking stats class! I swear to god, I haven’t had to fight down the urge to rip someone’s throat out so hard since my first full moon,” Erica said, slashing at the air above her face for emphasis. Stiles wound a lock of her hair through his fingers absently and made sympathetic noises.

Any further response he might have made was cut off suddenly, though, by Isaac’s arm shooting out in front of him and intercepting a frisbee that had been headed straight for his face. Stiles blinked at the hand bare inches from his nose.

“Our bad!” called a guy wearing nothing but a garish bandana and cargo shorts. “Throw it back, bro?”

“Isaac,” Boyd said warningly just as Isaac’s grip started to shift.

“ _Fine_ ,” Isaac said, and whipped it back (way over the guy’s head) at merely human strength. “Ultimate assholes.”

Stiles swallowed. “Well. Those wolfy reflexes sure do come in handy.”

Erica patted his leg. “Derek would rip us all a new one if you showed up with a black eye.”

“I can take care of myself!” Stiles protested halfheartedly, but then got sidetracked by a new thought. “What’s up with that, actually? Derek’s not an alpha, but you all sure treat him like one. Is that normal? I can never tell if something seems weird because it actually is, or just because my own pack has so many other kinds of things in it we nearly outnumber the wolves and therefore have no idea what normal is.”

Erica craned her neck back slightly and exchanged a look with Isaac, who shrugged. She settled back down. “Well, like, normal is relative, right? And it’s not like we,” she gestured to indicate the three of them, “really know, because we were all bitten in, but yeah, the Hale pack is more traditional than yours. I mean, the Hales are all born wolves, et cetera. But they’re also weird, because they concentrate more on diplomacy than territory, and, like, this territory wasn’t even theirs originally? They’re from somewhere else in California…”

“Beacon Hills,” Stiles murmured.

“Yeah, your town, right? I don’t know what happened there, but it ended up with them moving the whole pack up here, and I guess after they finished college? Both Laura and Derek got really concerned about keeping an eye on all the supernatural activity in the area.”

That part didn’t seem at all weird to Stiles. Someone had to do it, after all. “Sure,” he said, not entirely certain how this related to his question about Derek.

“You know Derek speaks a bunch of languages, right?” Isaac said from behind him. “I know you’ve mostly only seen late-night Derek, but he has an actual job.”

“I know that!” Stiles insisted. “He told me. He does translation for his mom.”

“Yeah,” confirmed Erica, “but he also does volunteer translation at the hospital, because he is secretly a fluffy marshmallow on the inside, as you know, but also because it lets him keep an eye out for supernatural attacks. Anyway, he met me there.”

Stiles made a concerned noise.

Erica waved a hand. “Oh, no, I wasn’t attacked or anything. I had epilepsy. I was there after a big seizure and he ended up talking to me. Next thing I knew, I was being introduced to his mom, and she offered me the bite. Like I was going to turn that down.” She flexed the hand on the ground close to the tree, popping her claws where no one else could see and giving a very pleased smile. “And that’s where he met Isaac, too, after his dad beat the shit out of him again.”

Stiles shot a look at Isaac over his shoulder, wondering what he thought of Erica’s casual manner of delivery. Isaac gave him a smile that would have been beatific if not for the slightly bloodthirsty edge of satisfaction. “He’s in jail now,” he said with a shrug. “And Laura got me emancipated and moved in with them right away, so I knew for sure I’d never have to deal with him again.”

Erica nodded sharply in agreement. “And Boyd…”

“Has his own reasons,” said Boyd from his chair as he turned a page, shutting down that line of conversation.

“Right. Anyway, Derek brought us all into the pack, so he’s kind of ours. Or we’re his. Something like that. The pack is pretty big. If it ever splits, we all know who we’d go with.”

“Huh,” Stiles said. “Who’s supposed to be the alpha after Talia?”

“Laura. That’s why she’s a lawyer, she’s been studying to help with all the treaty stuff. Plus working in the DA’s office right now gives her an in with the police department.”

“Smart,” Stiles said approvingly. He made a mental note to talk to Scott about how their pack members should think about positioning themselves in Beacon Hills after graduation.

The frisbee came flying back towards them. This time Stiles saw it, though, and knocked it subtly off course with a gesture and a word muttered under his breath, but that didn’t prevent Isaac from pushing himself up and dusting off his hands. “That’s it,” he said, bending over to pick up the offending frisbee. “We’re showing them how to do this properly. C’mon, Erica.” He turned and offered her a hand. They wore identical terrifying grins as they took off into the field, already flinging the frisbee at each other and catching it with increasingly acrobatic leaps.

Stiles shook his head as he watched them go. “Do they know how scary they are?”

“Yes,” said Boyd, like it was obvious.

Stiles raised an eyebrow at him. “Not going to join them?”

Boyd just gave him a brief flat look before going back to his book. “They both need to feel scary sometimes. I don’t.”

Stiles just blinked at him. He never quite knew what to expect yet from Boyd, but deep psychological insight definitely hadn’t been on the list.

“Oh,” Boyd said, reaching down to his backpack and fishing out a book, “Derek wanted me to give you this. Said you and Lydia would find it useful.”

Stiles accepted it eagerly. “Oh, dude, a grimoire, are you serious?” He ran his hands over the worn binding appreciatively, tracing the crest embossed on the cover with his fingers. He flipped it open to see what language it was in and tilted his head to one side. “Is this… Schweizerdeutsch?”

Boyd huffed out a small laugh and Stiles looked at him in surprise. “I’m going to tell him it took you all of ten seconds to figure out.”

Stiles felt the back of his neck heat up, pleased. He looked down in embarrassment. “Well, I mean, it’s not like I can read it particularly well. Certainly not well enough to try anything out of here without a real translation. I’ve just learned to recognize a little bit of a lot of languages.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about the translation part. I’m pretty sure Derek is looking forward to helping you with that.”

“Boyd!” Stiles looked at him in astonishment. “You’re just as bad as the rest of them.”

“I’m just quieter,” he confirmed with the ghost of a smile, but then he sobered and said more seriously, “We care about him. Derek doesn’t date. He never seemed interested. Ever.” He sat forward and let his eyes glow slightly yellow. “Don’t hurt him.”

Stiles swallowed. “I won’t,” he promised quietly. “I would never.”

Boyd sat back and nodded in satisfaction, discussion apparently over. Stiles tried to follow his example and return to actually getting his homework done, but his mind kept wandering, sifting through all the conversations of the past several days, piecing more and more fragments together.

What the hell had happened in Beacon Hills?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boyd's reason: His little sister was taken by something supernatural and he's been trying to figure it out ever since. He doesn't like to talk about it. Laura found the police report when she first started working for the DA and got permission to go through cold case files. She recognized the signs and told Derek, who then went and found Boyd at his after-school job. Boyd and Derek bonded over their mutual intense desire to protect everyone around them.


	6. Chapter 6

In Stiles’ defense, it was one of the few days he had an actual morning class, he hadn’t finished his coffee yet, and he’d just gotten an email notification (which he was hoping was a class cancellation, because the idea of going back to bed for a few hours with no unfinished assignments hanging over his head was _really_ attractive), and that was _entirely_ the reason he jumped as much as he did when Derek said his name almost as soon as he stepped out of his dorm. Right in his ear.

“Oh my god.” He would have put his hand over his heart dramatically, but it was holding his coffee. (Yay for lids!) And the other one was busy discharging a defensive spell back into the ground. He flicked his fingers discreetly one last time behind his back and grinned sheepishly at Derek. “Hey! You should wear a bell.”

Derek raised an eyebrow.

“Maybe a nice charm bracelet from the hippie store,” Stiles said, completely uncowed. “I was planning to eat lunch at the deli next door today anyway, I can pick you out something nice.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Derek said, falling into step beside Stiles as he headed for his class, which was sadly not canceled. “I don’t know why I like you.”

“My devastating good looks and irresistible charm.”

“Ah, yes, how could I have forgotten.”

“Okay, I’m not caffeinated enough yet for extended banter. I am super happy to see your face at this hour, but did you need something? Because this campus isn’t actually that big, so this walk isn’t going to take that long.”

Derek snorted and reached out to catch Stiles around the back of the neck to pull him in for a quick kiss. “Can I swing back when your class is over and take you to lunch?”

“Uh, yes?” Stiles gestured up and down at himself with his free hand. “College student. It is against my nature to say no to offers of food.”

Derek’s lips twitched at the corners. Stiles still felt like crowing every time he managed to coax a smile. He wondered if he’d ever get over that. He kind of hoped not.

“And, uh, then would you like to come back to my place? To study or whatever?”

Stiles felt his eyes widen slightly. “Definitely yes.”

The tips of Derek’s ears reddened. “Just… I love my pack, but I kind of want to be able to spend time with you without all of them around, and I know Laura has a big case she’s preparing for, so the house is pretty much guaranteed to be mine, so…”

“Seriously, dude, you do not have to work to convince me here. I’m in. I’m down. I’m…” he looked down at his watch, “… late. Shit! Gotta go!” He darted in for a kiss and then flung himself at the doors. When he half turned to call “Bye!” over his shoulder, he caught Derek with a ridiculously fond smile on his face.

He wouldn’t say he paid less attention in class than ever before, because his entire high school career easily put a lie to that, but it was safe to say he only managed to give the natural philosophers of the Enlightenment anything approaching their due through the ruthless use of four different colors of pen to force concentration.

As soon as the “okay, that’s it for today” was halfway out of his professor’s mouth, he had already slammed his notebook closed, slung it and his collection of pens back in his bag, and was out the door. As he burst out the front door of the building, Derek was indeed waiting for him, talking to a familiar-looking guy with long dark hair with what looked like green dreads woven in.

“So come by on Friday and we should have all the transfer paperwork ready for you,” Stiles heard Derek say as he handed the kelpie a business card.

“Hey, man,” Stiles said, hooking his chin over Derek’s shoulder. “Doin’ well on the whole blending in with the students thing.”

The kelpie fiddled with the woven bracelets on one wrist and ducked his head. “Thanks,” he muttered, but he looked grudgingly pleased. “I’ll, uh, see you later,” he said to Derek, gesturing with the card before he stuck it in his pocket.

Derek nodded back and then turned to Stiles, sliding an arm around his waist. “Hungry?”

“Almost constantly.” Stiles tilted his head slightly. “Well, if I’m thinking about it,” he amended.

Derek snorted in amusement and kissed his temple. “Come on, let’s go.”

“But this is wrong direction. The deli’s that way.”

“I’m making you lunch. It’ll be better, I promise.” Stiles was pretty sure he detected a smug tone.

“You just trying to prevent me from buying you a nice charm bracelet, I can tell,” Stiles huffed, but slid his arm through Derek’s and followed him home.

***

Derek had been dreaming of having Stiles in his space for days and had finally gotten sick of trying to come up with a smooth way to make that happen. Watching Stiles wandering around his living room, running his hands absently over pretty much everything in touching distance, made him smile and settled something deep inside him. He forced himself to turn away and go back to making their lunch when it was clear Stiles was absorbed in looking at his bookshelves.

He heard a thump and looked over again to find Stiles with his bag on the floor next to him as he crouched to look at the books on the lowest shelf. As he watched, Stiles pulled out a book and settled cross-legged right there on the floor.

“We have chairs, you know,” Derek called from the kitchen. “And a couch. It’s right there.”

“Mm-hmm,” Stiles replied vaguely, already lost.

Derek grinned down at the eggs he was beating. He did _not_ startle several minutes later when Stiles wrapped an arm around him from behind and peered over his shoulder.

“Whatcha makin’?”

“Quiche.” Derek added the bacon he’d just finished chopping to the eggs.

“Is our entire relationship destined to be built on a foundation of bacon and eggs?”

“And coffee. We mustn’t forget the coffee,” Derek added, turning in Stiles’ arms for a brief kiss. “Honestly, I can think of far worse things to build on.”

Stiles wasn’t satisfied with just the one kiss and pressed him back into the counter for another one. Derek closed his eyes and allowed his hands to slide across Stiles’ lower back, pulling him closer… until the pre-heat signal for the oven went off. He pulled back with difficulty. “Let me— just let me get this in the oven.”

The smile Stiles gave him at the break in his voice could only be described as wicked. Derek felt a shiver of anticipation run down his spine as he threw together the rest of the quiche and stuck it in the oven. He realized, as he set a timer, that he didn’t think he’d ever felt like this. He knew, intellectually, that happy relationships happened; he was surrounded by them—his parents; Erica and Boyd; probably Cora and Lydia, not that Cora had admitted that yet—but it had never actually happened that way for him. After Kate, he’d just felt… cursed. Shaking his head, he pushed that thought back down. It didn’t belong here, today, with Stiles, in his sun-filled kitchen.

He went to sit on the couch and twisted to look over the back of it, chin on his folded arms, at where Stiles had now surrounded himself with a half-circle of open books on the floor around him. “Did I lose you again?”

“Huh?” Stiles looked up, chewing absently on his thumbnail. “What? No! I just haven’t seen these before, and…” He shrugged helplessly.

“You can come look at them whenever you like,” Derek said. It wasn’t like he didn’t understand the allure.

Stiles lit up. “Awesome! I’m gonna take you up on that, you know. You’re probably going to be sorry you made that offer,” he warned as he extricated himself from his book nest and climbed over the back of the couch to sit next to Derek.

“I sincerely doubt that.” Stiles shot him a skeptical look, but Derek felt confident in his response. He wouldn’t regret anything that brought Stiles over more often, now that Derek had succeeded in getting him here once. He pulled Stiles’ legs across his lap and settled back into the cushions. “We’ve got thirty-five minutes. Tell me about your pack.”

“What, you didn’t get the rundown from Cora and your emissary?”

“Cora is trying to annoy me by knowing more than I do, so I’m specifically not giving her the satisfaction of asking.” Stiles cackled. “Shut up, you don’t have sisters.”

“Lydia and Allison are close.”

“Not if you didn’t grow up with them, believe me. And our emissary was…”

“Cryptic and unhelpful?” Stiles said, almost absently, as if it was to be expected.

Derek looked at him in surprise. “Nooo, I was just going to say on her way out of town for a few days, so I only had her on the phone for a few minutes. Why? Is that what your emissary acts like?”

“Technically, _I’m_ our emissary, so definitely not. But it’s what Deaton has always acted like, and he gave every indication he was like that because it was expected. Or required.”

Derek pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, that’s not normal. Seriously, tell me about your pack. I want to know what’s important about them to _you_.”

Stiles stared into space for a few seconds and wriggled around until he was more comfortably burrowed into the couch. “Okay, so there’s Scott, our alpha, who was bitten by a rogue when we were in high school and got us into this supernatural life in the first place. Deaton was his boss at the vet clinic and knew he was a werewolf for months before he said anything.” The annoyed look on his face even this many years later made his thoughts on that clear. “And then there’s Allison; she and her dad are Argents, and wasn’t it fun learning what that meant, let me tell you, but they were cool after some, uh, misunderstandings got cleared up about whether Scott was going to be a good wolf or a bad wolf, and now Chris is like everyone’s scary, overprotective dad. He’s actually been our main source of reliable information about the supernatural. Allison dated Scott when we were in high school, but now, like I said, she’s like my sister. Ummm, Lydia you know about: banshee, former presumed love of my life, platonic soulmate and ball-buster forever. Later additions to our merry band include Kira, who’s a kitsune like her mom, our other main source of information, when she’s feeling chatty, and Malia, our wild girl werecoyote. And Liam, Scott’s first bitten beta—that was kind of a mistake, but it worked out—and his girlfriend Hayden, also bitten, but her case was more like Erica’s, it sounds like. Heart condition. Corey is… a weird chimera thing. Jackson was a kanima—” Derek jerked at this, but Stiles continued “—but now he’s just a werewolf and is studying in London. He’s only kinda-sorta in the pack anymore? I dunno, it’s weird.” He paused to breathe and actually focused on Derek again. “On the more gossipy side, Scott’s dating Kira now, but she’s on study abroad in Tokyo this semester. I used to date Malia, but that didn’t last long. I think she just liked having someone to sleep next to. On. Around. Whatever.”

Derek rubbed Stiles’ ankle with his thumb and breathed through his instinct to growl possessively. Thank god Laura wasn’t home; she’d take one look at him and laugh her head off.

“So anyway, eventually we—well, mostly me and Lydia—figured out we weren’t just a random group of supernatural misfits and that Scott could actually turn us into a pack if he had an emissary to help anchor it, and now,” he spread his hands in a “ta-da” gesture, “here we are!”

Derek tightened his hand on Stiles’ ankle and squeezed gently. “I get the feeling you glossed over an awful lot there.”

“That would be correct. But, miracle of miracles, I’m actually tired of talking now.” He nudged Derek with the foot not being held. “Erica told me you’re originally from Beacon Hills, but then she clammed up. What happened?”

Derek closed his eyes and sighed. It wasn’t like he hadn’t known this was coming. “Hunters—Argents, actually—burned our house down.”

Stiles flailed and pushed himself up until he was sitting more upright again. “They did _what_?”

“Kate Argent, Chris’s younger sister, did you meet her?”

“Allison’s crazy aunt? Yes, unfortunately.”

Derek could feel his face doing something unpleasant. His brows had drawn so far down they were threatening to give him a headache. “She, um, used me to get close to my family, and then she tried to kill us all. We moved.”

Stiles scrambled up so he was kneeling on the couch next to Derek, trying to smooth his forehead. “Hey, no, it’s okay. Looks like I’m not the only one who can gloss over some things.” He looked at Derek in concern for a second. “Wait, hold on, I can do better than this.” He muttered something that sounded like bastardized Latin under his breath and rubbed his fingers together before bringing them back to Derek’s brow. Now the fingertips left a wake of not exactly coolness, not quite tingling, just… relief. Derek felt himself relax and opened his eyes again, trying to look at Stiles’ hand. There were faintly glowing lines running in a web down his fingers, across his hand, and up his arm. “Cool, huh? I was trying to figure out how werewolves took pain. This isn’t remotely the same, but it works pretty well.”

“Very cool,” Derek agreed, bringing Stiles’ palm to his mouth and kissing it.

At which point his mother walked in, along with his father and their emissary. Both Derek and Stiles froze in shock.

“Mom? I thought you weren’t getting home until tomorrow.”

“We took an earlier flight,” Talia said faintly, keen eyes taking in everything before her and starting to crinkle into a smile at the corners. Before she could say anything more, though, Stiles interrupted.

“Aunt Agnieszka?!”

“M—” their emissary began, equally surprised.

“No!” Stiles exclaimed.

“Stiles?” she amended.

“So apparently you _do_ know our emissary,” Talia said.

“Why doesn’t anyone fucking tell me anything?” Stiles wailed.

The quiche timer went off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I did have quiche for dinner tonight.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter got a little more serious that previous ones, sorry. Necessary plot stuff happening, though.

They sat around the neatly set table like adults. There were matching plates and full sets of cutlery even though they were realistically each only really going to use a fork and goddamn cloth napkins, and if Stiles hadn’t been practically vibrating apart with impatience, he might have made a comment on how very civilized it all was.

He wasn’t feeling very civilized at the moment.

He glared across the table at his aunt as he spooned fruit salad out onto his plate angrily. He hadn’t been aware he could spoon fruit salad angrily, but he was managing it now. Truly, a day for learning _so many_ fascinating new things.

She just blinked at him, expression utterly bland and innocent.

Derek put a hand on his knee to stop the jittering that Stiles hadn’t even been aware of, not that he was surprised, and cleared his throat. “So, uh…” he started, and Stiles turned toward him, pointing at him with the serving spoon, which Derek hastily removed from his hand, along with the bowl of fruit.

“You! Don't think you’re innocent here. Why didn't you tell me who your family’s emissary was?”

Derek’s brow creased. “I didn’t know. How would I have known? It’s not like her last name is Stilinski.”

Stiles sat back against his chair and crossed his arms. “No,” he muttered grudgingly. “She’s my mom’s sister, not my dad’s.”

“Honestly, Stiles,” Agnieszka said, “I had no idea you knew about this world, this life. I would have been down in Beacon Hills to train you in a heartbeat if I’d known, I swear.”

“Was there no… sign or something that he was gifted?” Talia asked curiously, spearing a piece of pineapple. “I’m sure I should know more about how your side of things works, having worked so closely with emissaries for so many years, but I confess I haven’t paid much attention.”

“There are signs, but they don’t really show up until puberty, and Claudia…” Agnieszka trailed off.

“Died when I was eleven,” Stiles finished for her. “And then you hardly ever visited.”

Now Agnieszka did look mildly ashamed. “Your dad… it was clearly hard for him whenever I would come. After the first few times, I thought it would be better to wait until he invited me.”

Stiles winced. “And then he didn’t. Yeah. Well, I had to learn the strategy of avoiding problems until they go away from someone.”

“Oh, no, that was totally Claudia,” Agnieszka said and took a bite of quiche. “’s why she ended up married to a mundane and didn’t tell either of you about the existence of…” She waved her fork around to generally indicate all of the supernatural world.

Stiles thought he’d gotten over being angry at his mother for dying years ago, but apparently not. He could feel a spark building in his fingertips and dropped his fork before he could accidentally ruin the metal. Derek reached for him, but he held up a hand to warn him off, and touched the other one to his chest, where he could channel the undirected energy into the grounding knotwork tattoo there and it could cycle through the continuous pattern harmlessly until it was reabsorbed. It had been one of the first tattoos he ever figured out, and one of the most useful, but now he found himself wondering what kids who didn’t have to teach themselves by trial and error did. Wouldn’t it have been nice to know.

He ran his fingers down the inside of his right forearm, causing the invisible calming mantra he’d inscribed back when they’d seemed to be dealing with things that could sense fear and anxiety every other week to flare briefly, and felt the false serenity roll over him. He’d quickly learned that it really only locked whatever he didn’t want to feel away until a later time, so he didn’t use it much anymore, but sometimes he’d take what he could get. He was dealing with another pack’s alpha and emissary right now, no matter how related they may have turned out to be; he needed to be able to _think_.

He looked up to find everyone staring at him, concerned. He gave a tight smile, knowing it didn’t reach his eyes. “You ever have one of those moments that suddenly makes it clear just how fucked up your own perception of normal has gotten?” He ran his fingers back through his hair with a sigh, then sat up straight. “Look, not that this lunch isn’t great,” he shot a brief, real smile at Derek, “but I would really, really like to feel like I’m operating with something approximating all the information at hand _for once in my life._ Someone tell me what happened in Beacon Hills way back when. I feel like it’s increasingly relevant and I’m the only one in the room who doesn’t know what’s going on.”

Stiles really hated not knowing what was going on.

Talia patted at her lips with her napkin and traded glances with her husband and Agnieszka before nodding. “Shall we adjourn to the living room?”

***

There was a part of Stiles that was surprised when Derek settled next to him on the couch. He’d been half expecting to end up alone against the rest of them, something about the mere topic of Beacon Hills throwing him back into the mindset of those early years, their tiny pack of fumbling teenagers against the world, operating on so very few clues.

He narrowed his eyes at his aunt again as a thought occurred to him. “Why do you seem so shocked to see me here? Derek said he asked you about our pack, and you specifically mentioned me. Clearly you knew I was an emissary.” He could feel his heartbeat rising with his temper, and Derek reached over to take his hand, thumb tracing small, soothing circles on the inside of his wrist.

Agnieszka was shaking her head emphatically, curly hair falling from her loose bun. “No, no,” she assured him, “all I relayed was the general impression I had of the McCall Pack emissary. I had no name. That isn’t… common, but it’s also not uncommon, and I suppose I just assumed your alpha was keeping you anonymous because you were all still so young. Emissaries can be vulnerable, and you are all in college, split up.” She tilted her head to the side in thought, though, and her eyes lost focus. “Though… I feel like those are all justifications I just came up with. Those are not old thoughts. I… Huh. Very little real information comes out of Beacon Hills now. If I try to focus on what I actually _know_ , real, actual facts, I find very little.” She started ticking off points on her fingers, brow furrowed as if it were taking real effort. “There is a new pack there. A boy named McCall is their alpha. He is… he is a True Alpha. His emissary has impressive magic. He is allied with a banshee.” She relaxed. “That’s all.”

Talia frowned. “That definitely should not be all, not for a pack so close, let alone one in our old territory.”

“No, I know,” Agnieszka said. “This isn’t natural. Something is actually preventing me from knowing, encouraging me to fill in details for myself.”

“Tell me,” Stiles said. “Tell me what happened before, and I’ll tell you what’s happening now, and then maybe this will all make sense.”

Talia nodded again. Her husband put his arm across the back of the couch behind her, not quite touching, but offering the support if she needed it. Stiles couldn’t help glancing down at Derek’s hand on his. Talia took a breath. “I don’t know if you’ll remember much about this. It would have been happening around the time your mother was… ill. You know about hunters?”

“Allison Argent is part of our pack.”

Talia blinked a little at that news. “Well. Let me back up a little to give some context. I know I’ve been out of town, but have you met anyone else in the family yet?”

“Not really. Derek’s mentioned Laura, and Cora turns out to be roommates with one of my best friends, but I’ve never officially met either of them.”

Agnieszka snorted at the coincidence and muttered something that might have been “of course” under her breath, but Talia just continued.

“I have a younger brother, Peter.” Stiles looked over as Derek’s eyebrows did something complicated, but he didn’t interrupt. “He’s always been, hmm, ambitious. Driven.”

“Power hungry,” Derek said flatly.

“That, too. And not prone to consulting others if he thinks people might try to talk him out of something. Very much inclined to ask for forgiveness later, is Peter. Which is why he took off into the desert by himself and tried to court the Desert Wolf.”

Derek jerked in surprise, thumb stilling on Stiles’ wrist.

“She was—is, I suppose—without doubt a powerful entity, but she isn’t really a werewolf, she’s more properly a descendant of Coyote, and she definitely plays by her own rules, which Peter forgot, if he ever knew. Maybe he just didn’t care. He insists he was only thinking about what a powerful ally she would make for our pack. But he courted her. And he got her pregnant.”

Derek’s hand tightened over Stiles’. Clearly Stiles wasn’t the only one hearing this for the first time.

“He didn’t know. She figured out he was trying to use her and banished him from her sight, then called him back to her months later, furious. I went with him this time, and managed to keep her from killing the baby, but she was convinced Peter would try to use the child against her. I can’t honestly say she was wrong. The best compromise I could come up with to appease her was to erase his memories of her and put the baby up for blind adoption. I never knew where she ended up. And the Desert Wolf disappeared again after that as well.”

“You put a supernatural baby up for blind adoption?” Stiles asked incredulously.

Talia shifted uncomfortably. “I thought I’d be able to find her later. The system worked faster than I expected.” Her husband touched her shoulder lightly. She cleared her throat and continued. “We thought that was the end of it. Peter couldn’t remember what he’d done, so there was little point in punishing him. Years passed, life went on. But apparently the Desert Wolf believed her child had stolen some of her power and blamed Peter for it. She couldn’t find her child anymore than I could, but she must have decided killing Peter would at least make her feel better about it, because she hired Kate Argent to kill him.”

Derek sat bolt upright, hand now clenching Stiles’ tightly. “She did _what_?! You… I… Why did you never tell me this before? I thought it was all _my_ fault!”

Talia looked horrified. “Oh, Derek, honey, no.” She rose and crossed to the other couch, wrapping her arms around Derek. “You were a child, and she was a ruthless professional. Have you really been blaming yourself all this time? If anyone is to blame here, other than Peter, it’s me, for failing to protect you, as both your mother and your alpha. You couldn’t have known. We weren’t expecting her, and we never would have anticipated her going after us through you.” She pressed a kiss into his hair. “It was never your fault,” she assured him, but he was still holding himself tense, so she sighed and ran a hand over his shoulders one more time before saying, “We’ll talk about it more later.” She stood and resettled herself in her original seat again.

“Anyway, after… after the fire, there were some heated negotiations with the Argents, and we decided it would be better, easier, to move the pack up here, where there were fewer bad memories.”

Stiles looked at Derek, trying to evaluate whether he should find some excuse for them to leave, but Derek looked like he really didn’t want to talk about it, and his hand was still firmly locked around Stiles’, so Stiles allowed the desire for more information to win. “And what about Deaton? Where does he come into all this? Because Derek seemed most concerned about him when we were talking before. He’s what I was actually expecting to be talking to you about.”

Talia and Agnieszka both frowned now. “Yes, Deaton,” Talia said. “He was my emissary at the time. Had been for years, almost from the time the mantle of alpha passed to me. But when we decided to move the pack, he said he couldn’t come. Claimed he had failed me, failed to protect the pack, that he was no longer fit, that I should find a new emissary and start fresh. The alpha-emissary relationship, it’s one of trust, of mutual respect. If he felt he couldn’t do the job anymore, I could hardly force him. I’ve barely heard from him since. When Derek said he’d been working with you, I thought it must be a good sign, that he was willing to work with a pack again.”

Agnieszka was studying Stiles with a sharp gaze. “No, I really don’t think that’s what it was,” she commented.

“Definitely not,” he said grimly. He had a suspicion. “Tell me, was the Nemeton awake yet when you were there?”

“The Nemeton?” Talia asked in confusion.

“That devious bastard,” Agnieszka said.

Derek seemed to come back to himself abruptly. “You mentioned it before. It’s a… tree?”

“Yeah, this huge creepy tree out in the woods that apparently attracts supernatural creatures and can be used as a spirit prison, amongst other things. It, uh, it had a demon trapped in it during World War II,” Stiles shifted, uncomfortable as always at mentioning the Nogitsune, even in passing, “and then it got cut down, which apparently wouldn’t have been a problem except then it got reawakened by, uh, ‘the blood of an innocent dying on its roots,’ I think is what Deaton said.”

“Paige,” Derek whispered, lunging off the couch and out the door before Stiles could even register what was happening.

Mr. Hale (Stiles still wasn’t sure he actually knew the man’s name) turned his gaze from the slamming door to his wife. “I think your brother and Deaton have more to answer for than you originally thought.”

Talia looked deeply troubled, but Agnieszka wore an expression Stiles remembered from the few rare times he’d seen it on his mother’s face. She was _pissed_.

“We need to go to Beacon Hills,” she said, in a tone of voice that did not bode well for Deaton, or Peter, presumably. She looked over and caught Stiles’ gaze. “As soon as possible.”

He nodded and got out his phone to call Scott.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapters for the price of one today!

Stiles was patient, so patient, as he sat through the next hour of necessary negotiations between Talia and Scott to arrange to bring a fairly large contingent of the Hale pack into Scott’s territory. In reality, things went very quickly, since both alphas were in agreement about what needed to happen, and Stiles knew where his duty lay as emissary, but he remained keenly aware with every passing moment that Derek hadn’t come back yet.

“I’ll have the list of everyone we want to bring emailed to you by this evening,” Talia said. Her husband had already started making notes next to her, occasionally holding out the notepad to Agnieszka for confirmation. At one point, she grabbed the pen from him and added a name in all caps, which made him grimace, though he evidently conceded her point.

Stiles should have been wild with curiosity.

“That seems like just about everything we can nail down for now,” he said instead. “Scott, I’ll call you when I get back to my dorm and we can start our own list of people who need to be called in.”

Scott was absolutely in no way fooled by Stiles’ attempt to sound businesslike and no-nonsense, which was of course why he responded with, “Sounds good. Talk to you then.”

“Thanks, bye,” Stiles said as he stabbed the End Call button and grabbed the phone off the coffee table to shove it back in his pocket. He looked up to find Talia and Agnieszka watching him closely. “Oh. I, uh…”

Agnieszka gave him a half smile. “Go, Stiles. We’ll see you again soon.”

“Yeah. It was, um, good to see you again.” It came out awkward, but Stiles mentally shrugged it off as he picked up his messenger bag from behind the couch, where it still sat next to his abandoned semi-circle of books. There was nothing about this situation that wasn’t going to make him awkward. He’d just bulldoze through it like he always did. With one last “Bye” over his shoulder, he was out the door.

Only to stop in the middle of the walkway when he realized he had no idea where Derek had gone. He dug his phone back out and texted Erica.

**Stiles:** If Derek was upset, where would he go?

**Erica:** What did you do?

Stiles huffed in frustration and hit call. “He’s not upset at _me_ ,” he said as soon as she answered. “But I had to stay at his house and be emissary and not follow him when he left and he hasn’t come back yet and I finally got to leave and I don’t know where he’d go. So where would he go?”

“Jesus, man, take a breath. If the car’s still there, check the woods behind the city park.”

Stiles turned in a circle, trying to orient himself from the semi-unknown part of town where the Hales’ house was, but then he thought he had it. “Thanks, Erica.”

“Stiles, what on earth is going on?”

“I’ll explain everything later, I swear. Or at least someone will. But I gotta go now!”

“Dammit!” he heard as he lowered the phone, but he was already gone.

***

He actually found Derek not in the woods, but sitting on one of the swings, scowling down at his feet. He didn’t look up when Stiles dropped his bag and settled in the swing next to him.

“Hey.”

Silence.

“So as I’m sure you can extrapolate, since I’m here, we’re done being all official alpha-and-emissary-y.”

“How did you find me?” Derek looked up and narrowed his eyes at Stiles. “Did you use a tracking spell on me?”

Stiles held his hands up to protest his innocence. “No! I don’t even have anything of yours to do that with. Um, yet. I mean, I can for everyone in my pack? But we hadn’t really gotten to the point of my asking you yet…” Wow, he really knew how to dig himself into conversational holes. He cleared his throat. “Anyway. I just asked Erica.”

“Oh.”

“So can I ask who Paige was?” Stiles asked tentatively.

Derek closed his eyes, looking… anguished. Stiles couldn’t think of another word for it. “She was my first girlfriend. In high school. We were fifteen. She died. She’s the one who bled on the Nemeton.”

“How… how did she die?”

“She was bitten. It… didn’t take.” He swallowed harshly, which Stiles interpreted as meaning there was more to that particular aspect of the story. He let it go, but found himself frowning over a different niggling detail.

“But why were you under the Nemeton at all? I’ve been down there; I had to rescue my dad—long story—and it took us forever to find the place. Like, it’s hidden in the middle of nowhere, I don’t understand how you go from offering your girlfriend the Bite to her dying in a weird root cellar in the middle of the Preserve.”

Derek ran a weary hand over his face, looking resigned. “I didn’t offer it to her.”

“Well, I mean, not _you_ , you’re not an alpha. But your mother.”

“No, I mean it wasn’t _offered_ at all.” His hands tightened on the chains of the swing. “I wasn’t a lonely kid, you know. I was on the basketball team, I had lots of friends. But none of them knew… what I was. So there was always that wall of secrecy keeping me separated. And Peter knew that.” Derek looked up now, but he clearly wasn’t seeing the park in front of him. “He was the cool uncle, mom’s younger brother, the one Laura and I could go to to complain about our parents. He just seemed to get it. Everything. And he listened to me talk about Paige, and he said I could never really love her without telling her, and that it wouldn’t be worth telling her if I didn’t offer her the Bite, because she still wouldn’t really understand. Didn’t I want her to really _know_ me?”

Stiles made an inarticulate noise of objection. “You were fifteen! Why was he trying to get you to think like that?”

“Well, and that was the thing. My mother would never have gone for it, and we both knew it. Humans that young are rarely offered the choice, unless there’s some sort of extreme circumstances.”

“Like Erica and Isaac.”

Derek nodded. “But he said if I really wanted it, he’d make it happen.” He frowned again, brow furrowing in remembered confusion. “I don’t remember saying yes. I really don’t. But I guess I must have.”

Stiles was increasingly sure that Derek had said no such thing, but he wasn’t sure Derek could even really hear him right now, lost in his memory of what had happened.

“He called me to come to the high school. It was just a few days later, and I hadn’t really thought more about it. These things, bringing a human into knowledge of the pack, they’re supposed to take time. I hadn’t even started to think about how to tell Paige.” He let out a short, bitter laugh. “Turns out I didn’t have to. Because when I got there, the other alpha Peter had found? He was transformed, hunting her through the halls, and when he bit her, she screamed.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, and Stiles reached out to grip his forearm, unable to let him relive that moment alone. Derek let out a shaky breath.

“Peter held me back until he was sure she’d been bitten, then told me I should take her somewhere to wait it out. ‘Somewhere private,’ he said, but I knew he meant my mom would be mad. I knew about the root cellar under the tree. Peter had shown it to us when we were kids, and Laura and I used it as a place to hang out when the house got too crowded. No one else seemed to go there. It seemed like the logical place to take her. It just… it all made sense at the time.” He swallowed. “She didn’t make it. I killed her, in the end. Down there. In the roots. Like Peter apparently meant me to.” He glared, eyes flaring, fangs elongated when he bared his teeth. “How many times are people going to use me like this?” he growled.

Stiles got off his swing and moved to sit on his heels in front of Derek, hands resting on Derek’s knees for balance, but also to ground him, because he seemed to need it. Honestly, Stiles did, too. He looked up directly into Derek’s eyes, making sure his focus was back in the present.

“Hey. I honestly have no idea how normal werewolf society works, or how normal Bite procedure is supposed to go, but that? Is clearly fucked up, and it definitely wasn’t your fault. You were _fifteen_. And then whatever happened with Kate. You’re right; you were used. And it wasn’t fair.”

Derek just stared at him, resigned, like Stiles wasn’t telling him anything he hadn’t told himself before. “I know. I need to try to get over it. Work through my issues.”

Stiles tightened his grip on Derek’s knees. “No, now you need to get payback,” he said fiercely.

Derek blinked.

Stiles was pretty sure his expression was edging into that grin that always worried Scott and made Malia’s eyes flare. “We’re starting to see the whole board now. We thought we were playing chess, but now it’s clear: this is a long, _long_ game of go. Years in the making. That story your mom told about Peter and the Desert Wolf? He’s always wanted power. She may have taken his memories of that attempt, but it didn’t change his character. He and Deaton have been cultivating the Nemeton for years now. Your side of the story about Paige just confirms it. I have never believed Deaton’s insistence that there was no way to destroy that damn tree. I just didn’t know how much he was working to actively protect it.”

Derek reached out and ran a thumb over Stiles’ cheekbone. “What did it do to you?” he asked softly.

Stiles felt his lips thin, but he forced himself not to push away from Derek. “That demon from WWII that I mentioned? Possessed me.” Derek’s eyes widened, but Stiles shrugged and waved one hand dismissively. “It was years ago. I’m better now.” He caught Derek’s gaze again and held it. “But I also _really_ don’t like being used.” He stood and held out his hand. “Come back with me now? I want to know everything there is to know about the Nemeton before I step back into Deaton’s territory. And I think you and my aunt Agnieszka have a lot to show me.”

“I can do that,” Derek said, and took his hand.


	9. Chapter 9

**One week and a mountain of research later:**

“We’re thirty minutes out,” Stiles told Scott. The holder he’d rigged on the dash for his phone was miraculously still holding on, this trip, so he’d just put the call on speaker. It was essentially the same no matter what when everyone else in the car was a werewolf anyway.

“Cool. You know where to go, right?”

“Yeah, I worked it all out with Allison and Lydia. I’ve got Derek and Isaac with me, Erica and Boyd right behind us, and then Derek’s parents and their emissary hopefully not far behind them.”

“Your aunt, you mean?”

“Yes, Scott, my aunt. Shut up.”

Scott just laughed. “See you soon, man.”

Stiles restrained himself from sticking his tongue out at the phone and hung up. Isaac raised an eyebrow at him in the rearview mirror. Stiles gave an exaggerated sigh. “We’ve been friends forever. It’s too late to dump him now.”

Isaac smirked and stretched his arms out along the back seat of the Jeep with a nonchalance that was definitely fake.

Stiles tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and frowned, becoming serious and focused. “Okay, so I need to tell you a few things about where we’re meeting. We’ve been trying not to talk about it much within what we suspect Deaton considers his territory, because we don’t know how much he monitors us. Or how he monitors us, for that matter. Which is why I worked everything out with Allison and Lydia while they were still at school.” He took a breath and told himself to stop rambling. “We’re going to the Argents’ shooting range.”

Derek stiffened in the passenger seat.

“It’s just Chris and Allison! No other Argents, I promise. After Gerard and Kate nearly got Allison to break the code, and Allison’s mom nearly killed Scott just for dating Allison, well. Some, uh, some shit went down, and long story short, at the end, Chris had very definitively broken him and Allison off from the rest of the family. At least Gerard’s bunch.”

Derek didn’t look completely at ease, but he did relax back into the seat again. He’d known about Allison and Chris already, after all. Stiles still couldn’t really expect him to be comfortable with the idea of actually seeing them.

“What’s relevant today, though, is that we’re meeting at the shooting range because it’s as shielded a place as we’re likely to find in Beacon Hills. Heavy soundproofing, steel in the walls as backstop, lead residue, which may not actually have any effect, but I figure can’t hurt, plus Chris and Deaton don’t really get along, so he avoids the place. We keep a lot of spell-making supplies there, plus the silver for the Argents’ bullets and arrows, not to mention all the stuff Chris puts in the tips of his bullets in the reloading room for, you know, hunting…”

Isaac was looking very alarmed. “What the hell is wrong with your town?”

Stiles huffed a laugh. “What an excellent question. Turns out, the Nemeton draws things to it. But we all just got used to it. New monster every week.”

“Jesus,” Isaac said.

“Seriously. But just, like, be aware there’s wolfsbane on the premises. And mountain ash and stuff. I don’t think the stillroom should be open so anyone can just wander in, but kind of maybe don't go in any new rooms without one of the humans with you?”

“Yeah, sure.” Isaac pulled out his phone and started texting, presumably to Erica.

Stiles glanced sideways at Derek. “You okay?”

He grimaced. “Not really. But it’s fine.” He kept his eyes focused on the road through the window. “I haven’t been back here in a long time. I didn’t really ever mean to come back.”

Stiles gripped the steering wheel until he could feel the tension in his knuckles. “I know the feeling,” he muttered under his breath.

***

“Stiles!” a dark-haired guy his age exclaimed, tackling Stiles in a hug when he was still only halfway out of the Jeep.

Stiles hugged him back tightly. “Missed you, too, buddy,” he said with so much sincerity Derek could tell any thoughts Stiles entertained about leaving Beacon Hills behind were as substantial as mist.

“You must be Scott,” Derek said, stepping forward to offer his hand.

“And you must be Derek,” Scott said cheerfully, shaking hands easily, which relieved Derek. He hadn’t been able to imagine Stiles with an alpha who was into power games, but you never knew.

Stiles turned as Isaac finally managed to extricate himself from the back seat of the Jeep, just as the second car pulled in behind them. “And this is Isaac, Erica…” she responded to his pointing finger with a sharp smile through her open window, “and Boyd,” who nodded as he opened his door.

“Your mom said they’re a ways behind us,” Erica reported as she hopped out of the car, “because, and I quote, ‘we don't feel the need to drive like bats out of hell.’”

Derek snorted. “Please. She’s the one who taught Laura how to drive.”

Erica’s expression turned gleeful. Derek wondered what he’d potentially let his mother and Laura in for.

Stiles just waved the comment off. “Pfft, whatever, I have a police radio. I know where all the speed traps are.”

“C’mon, guys, let’s head inside,” Scott said. “I thought your dad told you to get rid of that radio,” he said to Stiles.

“As if.”

Derek was beginning to realize the Stiles he’d been getting to know was actually very relaxed. This Stiles was… harder. Sharper. More constantly aware of his surroundings.

The Hale decision to move away was seeming better all the time.

Stiles took his hand as they stepped into the shooting range, and Derek glanced at him in surprise, but once he was through the door, he understood. All of his senses felt… muted. He instinctively tried to pop his ears, as if it would help. But then Stiles’ fingers tightened over his own, and he felt something even stranger. It was like he could feel all the walls, their exact dimensions.

His eyebrows must have communicated something to Stiles, (though how Stiles could possibly have catalogued an expression that translated to _what freaky magical thing are you doing to me now?_ when he so rarely seemed to use magic around Derek, he couldn’t imagine,) because Stiles looked down at their hands and then shrugged. “My magic is in all the walls. I guess you can feel it. I’ve never been holding anyone’s hand while doing a perimeter check before. Sorry if it’s weird.”

“No, it’s fine. Just… odd.” He gave his own shrug. “I can get used to it.”

Stiles blinked at him in surprise, like he hadn’t been expecting that response at all, and smiled in a way Derek was pretty sure had his ears turning red. But then Stiles shifted his gaze over Derek’s shoulder and abruptly let go of his hand so he could get enveloped in another hug.

“Dad!” he said, face buried in the older man’s shoulder.

“It’s good to see you, son.”

Stiles pulled back. “I was coming home in just a few weeks for break anyway.”

“And this means I can’t miss my son in the meantime?”

Stiles just grinned and shook his head, getting distracted again as more people entered the front room.

Derek felt his pack members gathering behind him, and he leaned slightly back into their warmth. Erica shifted so she could rest her chin on his shoulder and make it look natural. “It’s weird, seeing him with his own people,” she murmured right beside his ear. He gave a fractional hint of a nod. “I was starting to think of him as ours,” she said.

Honestly, Derek had, too. He sighed, and felt her nails scritch down his back in sympathy.

They both straightened up as Stiles turned back to them.

“So, everyone. Introductions. We’ll have to do these all again in a little while when the Hale alpha and emissary arrive, but this will just get awkward.” Standing in front of what seemed like an incredible crowd of people for such a small room, Stiles pointed to each of them in turn. “This is Derek Hale, Vernon Boyd, Erica Reyes, and Isaac Lahey.” Derek forced himself not to shift under the interested scrutiny of so many eyes.

But then Stiles crossed the small gap and stood next to Derek to do the other half of the introductions. So casually, so easily, he slid his arm around Derek’s waist and began pointing again. “Scott you already met. My dad is the one in the sheriff’s uniform, obviously, as I’m sure you gathered. Allison is the frighteningly competent brunette beside him, who has forgotten to take her archery glove off again, I see. The incomparable Lydia you may already know, since you have a spy living with her. No puppies today, Scott?”

“They have school, Stiles.”

“School,” he scoffed. “When did we ever go to school when there was a supernatural emergency on the line?”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” the sheriff said.

Stiles rolled his eyes. “And lurking in the back is Chris. Uh, Argent.”

The man in question pushed himself up off the wall he’d been leaning on at his name and smiled tightly. “We’ve met.”

Derek gave him a nod of acknowledgment. Allison shot Derek a tentative smile, and he reminded himself they had no love for Kate either. Stiles tightened the arm around his waist briefly before letting go and clapping his hands. “We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s get this show on the road. In the range proper, Chris?”

“Yeah, we’re all set up.”

“Cool.” And with that, Stiles tugged open the first heavy door and gestured with a flourish for everyone to file in.

***

“I’ll be right in,” Stiles said as Derek brushed past him, and then caught his dad’s arm to hold him back.

His dad cocked an eyebrow at him.

“Oh god, did you give me an eyebrow thing? Have I actually been subconsciously seeking a man like my father?”

His dad ran a hand over his face with a long-suffering sigh. “Stiles.”

“Right. So Aunt Agnieszka is the Hale Pack emissary,” he said bluntly, having waited to say anything until he could actually see his father’s response.

“I… what?”

“I take it you didn’t know.”

“No, I most certainly did not.”

“Well, they’ll be here any minute, so I didn’t want you to be totally blindsided the way I was, but I guess there was some stuff Mom never told me. You. Us.”

His dad blinked and looked down at the floor for a long moment. “I guess so.” He looked up again and met Stiles’ eyes with a small, wry smile. “Explains some things, though, doesn’t it?”

“No joke.”

His dad rested a hand on the back of Stiles’ neck for a second and then moved to the door. “C’mon, let’s finish this.”

As Stiles followed his dad in, he wasn’t at all surprised to find Derek, Erica, and Boyd in a cluster of seats around one end of the long folding tables that had been shoved end-to-end into the space behind the shooting bays. Isaac, though, had somehow ended up next to Allison, and, well. Stiles had seen that look before, back when Scott first met her. There was a joke to be made in there somewhere about being catnip to werewolves, and he probably would have made it if Lydia hadn’t kicked him in the ankle when he pulled up a chair in the space that had been conveniently left between her and Derek. He glared at her, but let it go.

Then he took another head count. “Wait, where’s Malia?”

Lydia shrugged. “Must be running late. You know punctuality isn’t really one of the human niceties she values.”

Stiles knocked her with his shoulder. “Be nice.”

Chris glanced down at the screen of the tablet sitting in front of him. “She’s here now, anyway.”

Derek frowned a question.

“Security camera feed,” Stiles explained, and Chris tipped the tablet up to illustrate. Which was why they all saw her freeze in the middle of the gravel on her way to the front door, turning to stare at the other car pulling in behind her.

Lydia shoved at Stiles’ shoulder frantically. They all knew that posture. “Go, Stiles. She’s about to shift!”

Stiles and Scott both sprang for the door at the same time.


	10. Chapter 10

Stiles crossed the gravel of the parking lot as fast as he could and caught Malia’s shoulder just as her claws started to come out. He slipped around in front of her, which put his back to anyone getting out of the newly arrived car and made the spot between his shoulder blades positively itch, but he’d just have to trust Scott to deal with that, because this was… not good.

“Malia,” he said firmly, holding both her shoulders and trying to get her to focus on him, “Malia, I need you to look at me. You cannot change here. You can’t.” A car drove by on the street just then, as if to prove his point. God, he hadn’t seen her this bad in _months_. Which, actually, was probably the whole issue; he didn’t usually go so long between visits home.

With a sigh, he wrapped his arms around her and basically forced her to bury her face in the side of his neck. “You’re human, Malia, you gotta stay human,” he murmured into her hair, and oh, he knew what this must look like on that damn security monitor, which surely Derek and all the rest of them were still watching. He hoped Lydia was explaining. He hoped Erica and Boyd were keeping an eye (and a hand) on Derek. Not that he was fragile, but being back in Beacon Hills was already causing him to show some cracks.

Malia shoved at his chest. “Lemme go, I’m fine, I’m over it.”

“Yeah?” Stiles said, drawing back slightly. “Show me your eyes.”

She glared at him, eyes entirely brown again.

“Hands.”

She held one up in front of him disdainfully. “See? No claws. I’m _fine_.”

He let his arms drop. “Okay. Then what made you start to shift?”

At this, she refocused back over his shoulder and practically hissed out, “ _Him_ ,” as she pointed.

Stiles turned and saw the expected Hales and his aunt, but also a man he’d never met before. He had gelled brown hair, was wearing a borderline inappropriate v-neck shirt, and looked entirely too smug for someone six people were glaring at.

“Who the hell are you?” Stiles asked before he thought better of it.

“Peter Hale,” the man said smoothly, and that was it, Stiles did _not_ like this guy.

“What about him, Malia?” Stiles said, not taking his eyes off Peter.

“I’ve smelled him before. At the Nemeton. When things were wrong. Faint, though, so I could never tell what it was.”

“Well, aren’t you perceptive?” Peter practically purred, and Stiles was all of two seconds from casting a spell to silence him when Agnieszka smacked him upside the head and it took him down about seven notches.

“Knock it off,” she told him. “No one is impressed with you right now.”

Disgruntled, he ran a hand over the back of his hair to smooth it down and wisely chose to stay quiet.

Stiles was about to do official alpha introductions, but a glance at Malia showed her eyes starting to bleed blue again. “How about we take this show inside, everyone?” he suggested.

“Yes, let’s,” Scott said from where he’d stopped just behind and to the side of Malia, hovering within easy reach of his emissary but also putting himself between these new, unknown people and the rest of his pack. He gestured for everyone else to precede him. Stiles and Malia hung back until the Hale entourage had entered the building, Scott shooting them one last concerned look over his shoulder.

Malia moved to follow them, but Stiles caught her wrist. “Hey, you gonna be okay?”

“I can handle it.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be gone for so long.”

Her lips twisted into one of her _I’m very frustrated with you but am trying to cover my teeth because you told me not to snarl_ expressions. (She had several.) Then she huffed out a breath and looked away. “It shouldn’t matter. I should have another anchor by now. I shouldn’t need you.”

“Yeah, well. We don’t always get what we want.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” she muttered.

“But look, we’ve got access to real wolves now, and a real emissary, too. Once we get this Nemeton crap dealt with, we’ll work on it. Surely one of them will be able to help.”

She looked at him with an odd, unreadable expression, before darting in to give him a too-tight, sideways hug. “ _You’re_ a real emissary. We’ve made it work so far.”

“We have,” Stiles agreed. “But I’m starting to think that maybe we don’t have to settle for just making it work.”

***

They entered the building to find the others still in the front room, where they’d been joined by Chris Argent, who clearly knew who Peter was, and was totally on board with the collective decision to glare at him. He was standing, arms crossed, in front of the door into the range proper. He moved aside to let Malia through, then resumed his position.

“Stiles,” he said with a nod. “Is he coming in?”

 _Should he come in?_ Stiles heard underneath it, and understood the real question. He and Chris had worked long and hard on the spells protecting this building, their true base, and they were the strongest in the range. If there was any chance they’d be giving something away to the enemy by allowing Peter inside that one last ring of defense, they needed to make the decision now.

Stiles looked at Agnieszka and found her eyes already unfocused, intently studying things no one else could see. For half a second, he considered being nervous about what she would think, but he knew these wards were good. The magic he and Lydia had developed might be idiosyncratic, but it definitely worked. They’d had no other choice.

“Oh, yes,” she breathed, refocusing on Stiles with a razor-sharp smile. “He’s coming in.”

“Screw it,” Stiles said. “I’ve got to go in there for a second to get things ready, so we’re skipping formal introductions. This is getting ridiculous. Hales, meet Scott. Scott, meet the Hales. And that one’s my aunt,” he added, hooking a thumb over his shoulder at Agnieszka.

“Oh, I could tell,” said Scott, and Stiles would have wondered about Scott’s tone, but he was already brushing by Chris with a hand briefly on his shoulder to reassure him that this really was all right.

Things inside the range were… not as awkward as he’d feared. Yes, Erica and Isaac were both finding ways to be in contact with Derek, and Boyd had taken up a defensive stance behind them, but Malia had seated herself at the far opposite end of the table next to Stiles’ dad and was now ignoring the rest of the room in the way only she could.

And yeah, Stiles had magical shit to do, but he also understood weres by now, or at least he liked to think so, so he was going to take a few precious seconds to deal with Derek first, because he was as much a victim of this situation as anyone else in the room, for all that he hadn’t known it. Plus, he was Stiles’ boyfriend, and that was important, too, goddammit. He stopped next to Derek’s chair and nudged Isaac out of the way so he could crouch down next to him.

“Hey.” Stiles put one hand on Derek’s knee. An offering.

“Hey,” Derek replied, and covered Stiles’ hand with his own.

Stiles let out a breath he hadn’t intentionally been holding. “Sorry about that.”

“Lydia explained.”

Stiles nodded. “Good.” He was still sorry, though. He leaned in to give Derek a hug, which was really an excuse to put his hand on the back of Derek’s neck and allow him to do the same, but that didn’t mean Stiles couldn’t enjoy it anyway.

Derek buried his face in the side of Stiles’ neck, exactly where Malia had, and breathed for a second before pulling back, a quizzical frown drawing his eyebrows down.

“What?” Stiles said, searching his face for clues. “I know I must smell like Malia right now, but…”

Derek shook his head. “No, it’s not that. It’s… I know that scent, her scent. But I’ve never met her before. I don’t… I don’t know why.”

Stiles sat back on his heels again and looked between Derek and Malia. “Huh.” But then Chris tapped on the window with a knuckle and Stiles wrenched his attention back to more immediate problems.

“Lydia,” he said as he pushed himself up from his knees, “I need a containment circle. With the,” and here he devolved into vague hand gestures of curlicues that undoubtedly looked completely random to everyone else, but had her rolling her eyes.

“I don’t understand why you can never do these properly.”

“Well, I _can_ , but it takes me ten minutes and a ruler, and you’re here, so I don’t have to.”

“Fine.” She stood up and brushed her skirt off unnecessarily. “Where do you want it?”

He dragged an extra chair to a clear area in the corner. “Right here.”

She cocked her head to the side in consideration and then dragged the chair a few inches to the right. Then she closed her eyes for a few seconds. “Okay, I’m ready.”

“Awesome.” He reached into his pocket for a vial of mountain ash, emptied it into one hand, and then held the other one out to Lydia. She took it, he tossed the ash into the air, and she _sang_. Just for a second, just one note, but when the ash settled to the floor around the chair, it formed a perfect circle around a precisely angled pentagram, which was further embellished with the runes and incantations they’d spent so many nights tweaking into their ideal containment spell.

Stiles nodded, and his dad leaned over and rapped on the window in return.

Scott ushered the group in, Chris entering last and repositioning himself against the door again, apparently his chosen spot for these proceedings. With a flourish, Stiles gestured for Peter to take a seat.

Peter raised an eyebrow. “I can’t cross an ash barrier. And here I thought you were an emissary.”

Stiles smirked back at him. “It’s not activated yet. I assure you, you can cross it just fine. Please. Sit.”

It wasn’t really a request. Agnieszka nudged Peter between the shoulder blades to make it clear. With a disdainful huff, he sat. Stiles didn’t miss the way he toed at the lines of the circle as he went, though, trying to nudge the ash out of alignment, but the echo of Lydia’s voice still held it in place. They’d done this before. With a snap of his fingers, (completely unnecessary, but Stiles always enjoyed the drama of it), he activated the ash and saw Peter flinch, eyes flashing electric blue as it dulled all his senses of the room.

“Oh.” Stiles narrowed his eyes. “Huh.” He crossed his arms and tapped his fingers on the biceps of one arm. “Hey, Malia,” he said, never looking away from Peter. “Want to meet your dad?”

Chaos erupted behind him, but he still didn’t turn, instead watching the genuine shock play over Peter’s face. There was a snarl and a yip, which Stiles had honestly been expecting, and then a rangy, wary coyote appeared by his side, electric blue eyes fixed on Peter.

Stiles dropped a hand to rest on the top of her head. “What’s the matter, Peter? Don’t recognize your daughter by the Desert Wolf?”

“That’s not possible,” Peter whispered.

“Oh, but it is,” Stiles assured him. “And you should probably have a nice, long chat with your sister about that later. But right now,” he said, leaning forward, “for the sake of the daughter you’ve been endangering in this town for years, I suggest you tell us all about the plans you and Deaton have made for the Nemeton.”

Defiance blazed through Peter’s posture and he opened his mouth, clearly intending to retort, but Malia growled at him and he looked back at her. As their matching electric gazes met, he deflated. And then he spilled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting close to the end now, I swear!


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was high time for another chapter from Derek's POV, don't you think?

Sometimes, Derek reflected, being a werewolf had distinct downsides. People always seemed to focus on the strength or the healing or the claws or the enhanced senses, but they forgot about things like the vulnerability to mountain ash and various other substances otherwise harmless to humans. And the territorial instincts.

Derek was being viscerally reminded of those right now. He’d felt fine when they passed over the border into the old Hale territory, so he’d thought he was home free. They’d moved away years ago, the territory had accepted a new alpha, and it wasn’t like _he’d_ ever been the alpha, so he’d relaxed. He was a negotiator and treaty maker. He had great control. He was fine.

Now, sitting here in an enclosed space with so many members of the new pack in _his family’s territory_ , not to mention _Argents_ , watching Stiles ( _his Stiles_ ) on the security monitor as he helped another pack member (his ex, no matter how short-lived their relationship had been; Derek hadn’t forgotten) fight off the shift by burying her face in his scent, Derek was not fine. It didn’t help that he was also intensely annoyed with himself about it. His claws started making indentations in the underside of the metal folding chair he was sitting on.

"I'm sorry," Lydia said, leaning in. "It's just that he's her anchor."

Derek just nodded. There was no socially acceptable reply he could make that every other werewolf in the room wouldn't hear for a lie as soon as it left his lips.

Isaac shifted closer until his knee could knock into Derek’s. Erica just reached over and grabbed one of his hands under the table. Boyd rose to stand behind him, and Derek felt a little of the tension he’d only been peripherally aware of leave his shoulders at the knowledge of that solid presence now guarding his back.

He still wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve them.

He was trying to be subtle about breathing in the scents of his own pack members to calm down when the girl from outside came in. Her wary gaze marked them as she entered the range, but other than that, she paid them absolutely no attention as she moved quickly to the opposite end of the table. He caught a whiff of her scent as she passed, and it was… confusingly familiar. He felt his brow furrow as he tried to place it. Had he picked her scent up off of Stiles before? No, Stiles hadn’t been back to Beacon Hills since he and Derek started dating, and all of Stiles’ clothing just smelled of mild detergent and, faintly, his roommate. Where did he know that scent _from_? It was going to drive him crazy. Of course, it also appeared to have distracted him enough for his claws to recede, so there was that, he supposed. He wondered if this was how Stiles felt all the time.

Stiles himself came in just then, pulling Derek out of his thoughts. He watched Stiles take in the arrangement of the room in a split second, and then, surprisingly, he turned first to Derek. He nudged Isaac aside so he could crouch by Derek’s chair, offering a hand tentatively, as if unsure of his welcome now. And sure, Derek may have been fighting down jealousy a few minutes ago, but now Stiles was _here_ , where Derek could claim him again, in front of everyone, and he felt stupid for thinking of it like that, but whatever. He was just ready for this whole stupid day to be over. He leaned in when Stiles put a hand on the back of Derek’s neck and allowed Derek to do the same to him, and then leaned further so he could bury his face in the side of Stiles’ neck and just inhale for a moment.

But there was that damn scent again.

“What?” Stiles asked, looking a little worried. “I know I must smell like Malia right now, but…”

Derek shook his head quickly. “No, it’s not that. It’s… I know that scent, her scent. But I’ve never met her before. I don’t… I don’t know why.”

Stiles looked back and forth between Derek and Malia consideringly, his face taking on his familiar puzzle-solving look, but all he said was, “Huh.”

And then he rose and called Lydia to him, and they did magic. Real magic. Derek had known Stiles could do magic, of course, he’d done it in front of them before, but it was now clear to Derek that everything he’d ever seen Stiles do before was small, everyday magic. Nothing like this. Erica gripped his hand again, leaning forward to try to get a better view. “Holy shit,” she whispered, and out of the corner of his eye, Derek saw Isaac nod in agreement, but Derek couldn’t tear his gaze away from this new, confident, somehow _deadly_ Stiles. A shiver ran down his spine, and he honestly couldn’t tell if it was fear or arousal.

But then the others were bringing Peter in and putting him in that circle of ash like nothing Derek had ever seen before and Stiles was questioning Peter with a take-no-shit attitude Derek definitely admired and wished he could summon more often when dealing with Peter himself, and then… And then Stiles brought the entire world to a halt with the bald pronouncement that Malia was Peter’s daughter.

_So that explains the scent_ , Derek thought blankly before his gaze flashed to his mother. She was standing next to Agnieszka to watch the interrogation, probably intending to offer support and intimidation on Stiles' behalf as Peter’s alpha, not that Stiles had needed the help, and he found her far less shocked than anyone else in the room. Her eyes narrowed as she took in the staredown between Peter and the coyote now standing by Stiles’ side, and she nodded sharply.

“What’s the matter, Peter?” Stiles asked, not sounding the least bit sorry for the chaos and turmoil he’d just caused in the rest of the room, attention remaining sharply focused. “Don’t recognize your daughter by the Desert Wolf?”

“That’s not possible,” Peter whispered.

But one look at Talia said it was.

Peter caved.

***

Derek knew he should stay to listen to the full story, he did, but he simply could not remain in the same room with _that man_ , uncle or not, after he admitted he’d manipulated Derek into awakening the Nemeton. Honestly, that Peter was his uncle just made it that much worse. Was Derek doomed to trust the wrong people, over and over?

Isaac, always the most sensitive of the group, followed him out. He leaned against the side of the building as Derek paced. “It’s not your fault, you know,” he said.

Derek stopped and looked up sharply.

“It’s not your fault you trusted Peter.” He shrugged uncomfortably and looked away. “We always want to believe the best of family.”

Thinking of how many years Isaac had stayed with his father, despite the abuse, Derek could hardly deny Isaac knew what he was talking about. Maybe there’d been a more specific reason he’d been the one to follow Derek out; maybe he was simply the best one for the job this time.

Derek sighed and crossed the gravel to lean against the wall next to Isaac, letting their shoulders bump lightly. Isaac relaxed, and they stood there in understanding silence for a few minutes. Then Isaac looked over with a grin and a suggestively raised eyebrow.

“But how awesome was Stiles?”

Derek tried to bite back the smile fighting to spread across his face and felt his ears heat up. “Pretty awesome,” he admitted, eyes locked resolutely on the trees across the highway.

Isaac snickered.

“You’re spending too much time with Erica,” Derek said, but it lacked heat. Seeing Isaac happy and teasing still felt like a gift sometimes. He tried to hold on to that thought as he pushed himself away from the wall. “Come on, we should go back in.”

As soon as he pushed through the main entrance, though, he ran into Stiles, who grabbed his hand and started tugging him insistently toward the hallway behind the counter. “C’mon, I need your help.”

Isaac waved as he headed back into the range, so Derek let himself be led away.

“What do you need help with?”

“Well, I’m supposed to be getting all the grimoires out of the safe,” Stiles said, pausing to quickly draw a symbol on the wood of the door in front of them and then pushing it open, “but what I really wanted,” and here he yanked Derek in behind him and spun to shove him gently up against the door, “was an excuse to get you alone for two minutes.”

Derek wrapped his arms around Stiles and hugged him so tight it probably verged on uncomfortable, but Stiles didn’t complain, burying his face against Derek’s neck even as Derek did the same to him.

“Oh my god,” Stiles mumbled into Derek’s shoulder, “I want to kill him.” He was practically vibrating with tension as Derek ran his hands down his back.

“I know,” Derek said. “All the pain it sounds like the Nemeton has caused for all of you over the years…” He winced at the thought he’d had a hand in that, unwitting though his part may have been.

Stiles pulled back sharply, resting his hands on Derek’s chest as he looked him intensely in the eye. “No! I mean, yes,” he amended with a dismissive hand wave, “but no! Because of what he did to you. He _knew_ ,” and now Stiles was practically hissing with rage, “he knew exactly what happen to Paige, and to you, and he just didn’t care.”

Derek looked down, mouth tightening. “Yeah, well. It was a long time ago now.”

“Yes, it was.” Stiles cupped Derek’s jaw with one hand and tilted his face back up. “And now we end it.”

Derek knew Stiles wasn’t a werewolf, and he never smelled anything other than human, but for just a second, Derek could swear he saw light flicker across his amber eyes. The shiver from earlier ran down his spine again as Stiles drew him into a kiss, and he closed his eyes and let himself sink into it, just for a minute. While they could.

***

Too short a time later, they made their way back into the range with their arms full of books, which they deposited on the table. Derek started to move toward the far end, where it looked like all the combat-inclined people were gathering, since he figured he'd be of most use there, but Stiles barely looked up from where he was rearranging the books to snag his wrist.

“Nuh-uh, I need you here.”

“Really? Why?”

“Translation,” Stiles said, pointing at the various books he’d flipped open to apparently previously marked pages. “German, Italian, French, Spanish, Arabic, Old Irish, we’ve got a bit of everything.”

Derek frowned in confusion. “Haven’t you translated all of these already?”

Stiles waggled his hand back and forth. “Ish? The bits we thought were the most important. But we haven’t had access to someone as multilingual and in the know as you before, so we’re going to get _so much more_ done now!” He was practically rubbing his hands together in glee.

Lydia rolled her eyes at him and shot Derek a sympathetic glance. “I can take the French and Italian with no problem. Those I already translated anyway, but we didn’t really know what we were looking for.”

“Now we do?” Derek asked uncertainly.

“Now we do,” Stiles confirmed, already leaning over the table to pull the Old Irish tome closer. He reached out to snag Derek again, pulling him until he had wrapped the arm around his waist. Derek resolutely did not look up to see if any of his pack were watching, choosing instead to focus on the books over Stiles’ shoulder, trying to find a commonality in the pages they’d been opened to.

Agnieszka joined them. Derek looked over his shoulder at the corner, where Peter still sat on the chair in the middle of the circle. “Is it okay to leave him there?” he asked.

“Hmmm?” Stiles asked distractedly before his brain caught up with the question. “Oh, yeah, he can’t hear anything right now.”

Derek looked to Lydia in the hopes of clarification. “He can change the,” she waved a hand vaguely in what looked like a gesture she’d picked up from Stiles, “opacity, I guess is more or less accurate, of the ward. It’s part of what all the runes are there for.”

Derek shot a look at Agnieszka to see her reaction. He’d never heard of an emissary doing anything like this before, but he supposed they’d had a lot less need for direct magical interventions since they’d moved away from Beacon Hills, so perhaps it was more common than he thought. Agnieszka, though, was looking back at the circle around Peter with renewed interest.

“What’s the other part?” he wondered.

“Other… stuff,” Stiles muttered.

“Which we don’t plan to use on Peter, so don’t worry,” added Lydia. Derek blinked at the implication behind those matter-of-fact words.

“Maybe you don’t,” Stiles said.

“Stiles,” Lydia chided.

“Fine, fine.” He turned the page.

“There!” Agnieszka exclaimed, pointing.

Stiles cocked his head at the book. “Are you sure? How can you tell?”

Derek was already doing his best at trying to decipher the words. Old Irish wasn’t exactly his most called for language, and he’d gotten rusty.

“I’m sure. Peter said Deaton’s power harvesting plan was Druidic, and based on what little else he could tell us, I got a pretty good idea of which rituals he was probably twisting to his own ends. This is the main one, I’m sure of it.”

Barely taking his eyes off the page, Stiles flailed behind him for a chair. “Tell me everything you know.” He flailed his other hand and Lydia immediately produced an extra pad and pen from her voluminous purse, shoving them at him as she flipped open her own notebook.

Derek pulled up a chair next to Stiles and set himself the task of making sure they translated every word as accurately as possible.

They were so close to being done; there could be no mistakes.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Put my flight delay coming back from Howler Con yesterday to good use and finally got to work on this chapter. Just one more to go after this, I swear!

The bell tinkled cheerily over the door as Stiles pushed through it into the animal clinic. Deaton poked his head out of the back hallway to see who it was.

“Stiles. I wasn’t expecting you.” His brow creased every so slightly. “It’s not a school break yet, is it? Is everything all right?”

“Oh, no, everything’s peachy,” Stiles answered breezily, even as he watched Deaton closely. He had to; the man was so blandly smooth normally, it was hard to catch any kind of genuine reaction. “Just brought some new friends from college down to show them around town. They said it’d been a long time since they’d been in Beacon Hills.”

“Oh?” Still calm. Polite. Only vaguely interested.

Right on cue, Talia and Agnieszka pushed through the door behind Stiles. And there! Deaton’s eyes widened just a touch as he blinked in what passed for surprise with him.

“Hello, Alan,” Talia said.

Agnieszka smiled, though it wasn’t what Stiles would have called friendly. “Alan Deaton. It’s been a long time.”

Deaton tried to rally. “What brings you to my territory?”

Stiles raised an eyebrow and leaned on the counter to look between Deaton and Talia. “Your territory, is it? How interesting. Funny, I thought it was Scott’s. There was a whole speech about it, as I recall. About how he needed to defend it against all comers, especially since he was that rare, rare thing, a True Alpha. That others would come for him because of it.”

Agnieszka snorted. “Really, Alan?”

“Oh, yes,” Stiles went on. “Don't you know? True Alphas manifest their special power from the strength of their sheer virtue.”

“My goodness, how extraordinary,” Talia said, eyes wide and faux-innocent.

Agnieszka exchanged looking amused for looking disappointed. “Such a poor translation effort, Alan. I always thought better of your research ability, but I suppose I could have been mislead. You know full well so-called True Alphas just arise in packs with a clear power vacuum and extreme need.”

Talia shook her head sadly. “You could have called me. You know I would never have abandoned Beacon Hills in a time of need. There was no reason to put that poor boy through such an ordeal, stumbling his way through alpha powers and pack formation with no guidance.”

“Or maybe,” Stiles said slowly, tapping a finger against his lower lip in thought, “maybe you had a reason to keep a pack of teenagers isolated and in ignorance.” He straightened up and leaned forward on the counter. “Something like the Nemeton, for instance.”

“I don’t know what you mean…” Deaton started, edging toward the door to the back of the clinic, but Stiles snapped out a word to invoke one of his runes, trapping Deaton in place.

“Isn’t it amazing all the things my nephew has managed to teach himself? I may have to rethink my stance on magic self-study,” Agnieszka said sweetly. Deaton tried to lean back away from her as she paced forward. “Tell me, Alan, how exactly have you been preserving the balance these last several years? The Council is very interested to know.”

Talia stood behind her emissary, eyes bleeding slowly red.

Stiles pushed himself back from the counter and made a show of dusting his hands. “Well, it looks like you ladies have this situation in hand, so I’ll leave you to it.” His phone pinged and he dug it out of his pocket. “Oh, look, Scott says Kira’s flight was right on time.” The grin he threw back over his shoulder at Deaton on his way out was positively feral. “So nice to have the gang back together.”

***

Derek was waiting for him by the Jeep. “How’d it go?”

“No problems. Well, not for us, anyway. I wouldn’t want to be Deaton.” He slung himself into the driver’s seat, fingers already drumming nervously on the steering wheel.

“Where now?” Derek asked as he settled himself in the passenger seat.

“Back to the range, I guess,” said Stiles. “I can double-check everything until Scott and Kira arrive.”

Derek nodded, frowning vaguely at the dashboard in front of him.

“What?” Stiles asked, pausing in the act of shifting into reverse.

“Show me your house.”

“I…” Stiles wanted to say he really needed to check on things, make sure everything was prepared, but he’d done nothing else for the past day and a half. And Derek knew it. (Derek’s frown when he’d arrived at the range that morning to find Stiles still there, hair standing up on one side from the few hours of sleep he’d caught in the stillroom, had been epic.) Stiles stared out the windshield for a second, torn, but then nodded. “Yeah, all right.”

***

Derek didn’t know why he’d asked that. Well, no, he did. He’d thought he knew Stiles, college Stiles, and he’d been happy to wait for Stiles to let Derek in at his own pace. He hadn’t cared if he never saw Stiles’ dorm room; it would have told Derek something about him, certainly, but it was just a temporary space, shared with a roommate, lacking the years of accumulated knick-knacks and layered scents and echoes of experiences that made a place really belong to a person. And college Stiles fascinated Derek as he was, bright and curious and seemingly ready for anything.

But since arriving in Beacon Hills, it had become clear that Stiles was bright and free back _there_ because he’d come from darkness _here_. He was ready for anything because that’s what life had thrown at him for so long. College life, Derek suspected, was easier than Stiles had ever expected it to be. A vacation, even when he was working a deadly dull middle of the night shift in a deserted diner. He’d needed, all of a sudden, to see Stiles in his own space the same way he’d needed to have Stiles in _his_ house the week before.

The house Stiles took him to was deeply, incredibly normal. Modest, two stories, extremely American, from the front porch to the linoleum in the kitchen. It smelled like Stiles and his father together, his father a bit stronger now that Stiles had been gone for a while at school. Derek filed away smaller details in his mind, the older game console still installed under the living room TV, the family photos on the wall up the stairs, but he was mostly intent on watching Stiles in a place he considered home. Not as carefree as college Stiles, not as on-edge as emissary Stiles, but curiously also not as graceful as either, as if his body remembered being more awkward here and wasn’t quite sure how to stop. Derek followed him up the stairs to his room.

The scent hit him first, of course, intensely Stiles, and Derek couldn’t stop himself from breathing it in deeply. Stiles stopped in the middle of the room and turned to face Derek, arms out in a “here it is” gesture. Derek took a long, slow look around the room, taking in blue walls and an unsurprisingly plaid comforter before his gaze got snagged on the corkboard above the desk and clear dry erase board shoved in the corner. He took a few steps closer to the desk to study the things still pinned up above it.

Multiple sketches of a tree. Another of a fox. Some photocopied passages from books in multiple languages, some connected to the tree sketches with red string. Runes and incantations and magical circles. A few bits of actual plants, some color-coded with more bits of string. And the Japanese symbol for “self” pinned almost viciously in the middle. It was a little like looking at the inside of Stiles’ mind, chaotic but organized, connections everywhere.

Derek looked over at where Stiles now slouched against the windowsill. “There used to be more,” Stiles said, gesturing at the clear board. “We did a lot of supernatural crime fighting in here at first, before Argent built the range. Well, and I always do. It’s how I process, I guess. Very visual. You should see the wall of my dorm.”

Derek raised his eyebrows and Stiles laughed.

“Not like that! It’s all very tame academic stuff… at least as far as my roommate knows. Folklore Studies covers many sins. And red string is just as good at chasing down a thesis as it is at narrowing down a suspect pool.”

Derek allowed him a sideways quirk of the mouth at that as he looked back at the corkboard. Stiles stepped up to the desk and touched one of the tree drawings. “The Nemeton. Lydia drew these during her visions, when it was first… I don’t know, revealing itself to us? Really waking up? Whatever. And then some of our more promising references to Nemetons, things to remind me we have actually made some progress learning about it over the years.” His hand trembled against the edge of the paper, ever so slightly.

“Is the fox for Kira? You said she was a kitsune, right?”

Stiles’ expression clouded over, and he moved his hand to touch the Japanese character. “No. I mean, yes, she’s a kitsune, and technically that thing is, too, but it’s the Nogitsune that possessed me. The one that was imprisoned in the Nemeton.” He shook his head quickly and rolled his shoulders, letting his hand fall back by his side. “Turns out being possessed by a spirit that feeds on chaos is finally going be helpful, though.”

Derek caught his hand and laced their fingers. “Yeah?”

“Oh yeah.” Stiles turned his head and smiled. There were a lot of teeth. “I’m finding it very inspirational.” As if to prove it, he pulled Derek close and kissed him fiercely, only to pull back a moment later and drop his head to rest on Derek’s shoulder.

Derek reached up with his free hand to massage the back of Stiles’ neck for a moment, feeling Stiles’ weight settle against him more fully as he allowed himself to relax, probably for the first time in days, and Derek started to feel like maybe his presence here wasn’t entirely superfluous after all.

Stiles lifted his head and caught sight of the bedside clock. “While I want nothing more than to stay here and put my bedroom to more enjoyable use, we really should go. Kira and Scott should be back by now, and the sooner we get this over with, the better.”

Derek nodded once, sharply. He gave the back of Stiles’ neck one last reassuring squeeze, not sure if it was for Stiles’ benefit or his own, and then straightened up. The sooner they got this over with, the sooner he could get back to actually considering a future for himself free of so many of the specters of his past that had constantly haunted him. It was a thing he’d never really considered before meeting Stiles.

Stiles led him out of the room and down the stairs. Derek didn’t let go of his hand.

***

“Does everyone have their part of the plan?”

“ _Yes_ , Stiles,” said both Malia and Lydia, in nearly identical tones of exasperation. They shared a quick surprised look, and then Malia snorted in further annoyance.

“Can we just do it already?” she asked.

Stiles crossed his arms defensively. “There’s just not a lot of margin for error here.”

Scott reached out to put a reassuring hand on his forearm. “We know, man. But it’s a solid plan. We got this.”

Kira just grinned at him, bright and eager, and swung her sword in an anticipatory circle.

Stiles let out a breath and shook out his hands. Then he cracked his neck from side to side. Blew out another breath. Bounced on his toes a few times. “Okay. All right. Let’s do this.” He stepped up to take his place at one point of the pentacle they’d laid down in mountain ash around the stump of the Nemeton.

The pentacle was the most traditional part about this plan, really just there to contain the magic and keep it directed at the Nemeton, which Stiles fully expected to fight them. Or at least all the magical siphons and traps Deaton had been layering around it for years, preparing for the moment he decided it had finally come into its true power. Everything else he and Lydia had added, though, was as unexpected as they could make it. They’d consulted with Agnieszka about what spells Deaton had likely been using, and then what he (or any emissary with proper Druidic training) would have been expecting someone to use to counter them.

Stiles, of course, then planned to do the opposite of that. He hadn’t been possessed by a thousand-year-old trickster spirit for nothing. And if Deaton’s plans were thwarted by knowledge Stiles had gained due to Deaton arranging for him to end up possessed by the former prisoner of that very tree, well, that was just poetic justice, wasn’t it?

Stiles nodded and the others stepped into their places. Stiles, who could still tap into the chaotic echo of the Nogitsune. Malia, daughter of the Desert Wolf, a descendant of Coyote. Kira, lightning kitsune, as mercurial as her element when she wielded her power. Lydia, banshee, with a direct connection to the other plane. And Scott, True Alpha and therefore breaker of rules, standing in the middle of his own territory. A pack that should never have worked, the opposite of order and balance.

Stiles raised his arms and invoked the ash. Runes taken from every avenue of his and Lydia’s research flared to life. The pack tattoo they all wore tingled with warmth as Scott concentrated on what was _his_. The protective runes Stiles had developed to work for magic users and mundanes alike, and then badgered everyone into getting tattooed somewhere, began to glow, showing from beneath the edges of sleeves or shirt collars. Stiles’ and Lydia’s arms lit up along their entire lengths, and some tiny part of Stiles’ mind found the time to regret not taking off his shirt so he could show off everything on his torso and back, too. _You’ll just have to find some other time for Derek to admire it all_ , he thought, and then promptly told himself to _shut up and focus, dammit!_ Scott, Kira, and Malia’s eyes all lit up at the same time, responding to the magic gathering strong around them.

Ranged around them in a secondary circle, a stalwart though largely unmagical presence that Stiles drew at least mental strength from, were Derek, Erica, Boyd, Isaac, Allison, Chris, and Stiles’ dad, all offering physical protection from whatever the Nemeton might try to draw to it. Even Melissa and Natalie were there, staying ready at the cars with a frighteningly well-stocked medical kit and backup magical supplies.

Reassured by his mental inventory of everyone’s placement, Stiles turned his concentration to his emissary link to Scott, to his residual awareness of the Nemeton that he’d spent so long trying to ignore, and most importantly, to his will, his absolute desire, that the Nemeton be destroyed. In the back of his mind, the ghost of the Nogistune cackled madly.

Across the circle, Scott wolfed out completely. As he threw his head back to howl his ownership of the territory, they all moved into action. Stiles clenched his fists, gathering as many of the magical currents he could sense flowing into the Nemeton, where they snarled and tangled, clearly wrong, now that he knew to look, and _pulled_. To his left, Malia knelt, snarling, and dug her claws viciously into the large cluster of roots that erupted just at her point of the pentacle. Kira raised her sword high into the air and drove it into the ground in front of her, simultaneously calling down a bolt of lightning that struck the stump dead center. And Lydia… Lydia screamed. For all the deaths the Nemeton had caused. For all the sins people had tried to make it absorb over the many, many years it had been there. And for it, as Stiles felt the lines of magic loosen, let go, fall apart.

The runes and symbols written along the lines of the pentacle shot up in flames, and then burned themselves out in a shower of sparks.

Stiles blinked, the afterimage of the lightning strike showing starkly against the inside of his eyelids. He opened his hands slowly, feeling with all his senses for any sign the Nemeton wasn’t actually destroyed, but there was nothing, nothing. He could feel the magic currents that had been warped to the Nemeton already righting themselves, flowing back into their intended paths.

“Is that it?” Scott asked, eyes wide. “Did we do it?”

Cautiously, Stiles nodded.

“I felt it,” Lydia said. “I did. It died.”

Stiles released the ash circle, then scuffed it with a toe for good measure. As he stepped back, he felt suddenly lightheaded, but Derek was there before he could so much as sway, an arm around his waist. “Oh my god,” Stiles laughed. Even to himself, he sounded right on the edge of hysteria. “We did it.”

He saw Scott grab Kira and kiss her in jubilation as she exclaimed "So cool!"; saw Lydia reaching out unsteadily and being caught gently by Malia, of all people; saw his dad coming toward him with a look of concern on his face that he didn’t quite understand, until he heard himself say, “Aunt Agnieszka is going to be so pissed she wasn’t here,” in a weirdly faint voice before he lost track of how his legs worked. The last thing he remembered before his eyelids fluttered shut was the feeling of Derek catching him.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We did it! We made it to the end! Thank you all for sticking with this accidental saga!

“Stiles, you know I don’t like Skyping at the station,” the sheriff said as he hastily adjusted the angle of the laptop’s camera so less of the evidence board behind his desk was visible. He’d learned through hard experience that Stiles was not above taking screenshots to blow up and examine later. (“How else do you expect me to offer my valuable insight from so far away?” “I am suddenly concerned your course load is too light.”)

Stiles, of course, had learned to take his screenshots as soon as his dad answered the call, before he could remember to move the camera. This time, though, the board looked surprisingly— _suspiciously—_ empty. “We have to Skype so I can tell if you’re lying to me.”

The sheriff rolled his eyes. “I’m not lying to you, son, I promise. We really, honestly, truly have not had any further supernatural incursions since you killed the Nemeton. I would let you know.”

“Go get Parrish, he’s a terrible liar.”

Now his dad just sighed and gave him a fond, if exasperated, smile. It was one of his patented Dad Looks. “Stiles, I know how worried you are about this, and I swear I will tell you if it looks like the Nemeton might be,” he waved a hand vaguely, “powering back up or turning back on or whatever. Parrish knows what to look for.” He gave Stiles a more seriously concerned look. “I will call him in here, if it’ll make you feel better.”

Stiles rested his head in his hands, fingers tangling in his hair, and groaned. “No, it’s fine, I trust you. It’s just… It’s been a month and nothing horrible has happened. This seems too easy. That tree has been ruining my life— _all_ our lives—for years, and we finally actually managed to kill it? It doesn’t seem real.”

“I know, kiddo. But you did good.”

Stiles leg started bouncing nervously under the desk. He ran his hands all the way back through his hair and sat up. “Maybe I should come down this weekend.”

“Stiles. No.”

“Just to check!”

“No. You’re going to stay at school until the end of the semester, which is in just a few weeks, I might add, so I’m pretty sure you should have other things to concentrate on, like exams.” He raised a pointed eyebrow.

Stiles sighed. “Fine.”

“Besides, you told me yourself you won’t be able to do anything about resetting the ley lines until Kira gets back from Japan, and the longer she can train with the kitsune teachers there, the better she’ll be able to show you what you need to see.”

“Stop fighting me with my own words. It’s not fair.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You don’t sound very sympathetic.”

“I wonder why. Need more? Agnieszka warded the stump eight ways from Sunday, she and Talia stripped Deaton’s powers and sent him wherever they send bad Druids, and you’ve got a personal eye on Peter there. Everything is under control.”

“I know,” Stiles muttered, wishing he could finally _believe_ it.

“Now,” his dad said bracingly, clearly changing the subject, “what’s this I hear about Allison roping Isaac into being a counselor for the Argent outdoorsmanship camp this summer?”

Stiles broke into laughter. “Oh god. He really didn’t stand a chance, did he?”

“Nope.” His dad’s eyes flicked up to something beyond the computer and he nodded. “I’ve gotta get back to work. Go to class, son. And say hi to Derek for me.”

“I will, Dad. Thanks.” Stiles was smiling as he hung up.

He felt like it might even stay put when his phone buzzed with a text a few seconds later.

**Parrish:** No hellhound senses tingling. All clear. Go to class.

Maybe things really were going to be okay.

***

Derek was waiting for him when he got out of class, leaning casually against a tree in a way that made Stiles wonder all over again if he’d fallen into an alternate dimension, because surely that was the only way he could have ended up with a guy like that. And then Derek pushed himself away from the tree and came forward to meet Stiles with a soft smile and a coffee.

“This is the best dimension, I’m never leaving,” Stiles sighed as he took a sip.

Derek just looked at him quizzically. (Expression #25 on the eyebrow classification list. It had taken a while to show up.)

Stiles leaned in and kissed him. “Nothing. Just glad to see you.”

“Good.”

Stiles smothered a laugh at how smug he looked. “So what’s up?”

“Agnieszka said you had a session with her this afternoon, so I thought I’d walk you.”

“I thought you had that big translation project.”

Derek shrugged. “Finished.” The corners of his mouth twitched the way they did when he was repressing a grin.

Stiles shoved at his shoulder. “Show-off!”

“You, too, could finish assignments before the deadline if you weren’t such a master of procrastination.”

Stiles took another long sip of his coffee and replied in a lofty tone he was pretty sure he’d picked up from Lydia, “Play to your strengths, that’s what I always say.”

Derek just snorted.

Stiles grinned and let his hand graze Derek’s, who immediately laced their fingers together. Stiles suddenly found it a lot easier to believe in good things.

***

“Ooooh, where did you find this one?” Agnieszka asked, pointing to a rune in the latest of Stiles’ notebooks they were going through.

He turned his attention back to the table in front of him and flicked his gaze over the page quickly. “In an old French book Allison found in her family’s stuff.”

“Hmmm, obviously didn’t originate there, though.”

“No,” Stiles said absently, attention already wandering back to the other side of the living room, where Derek was sitting on the couch. With books. Interesting books Stiles hadn’t gotten to look at yet. He practically whimpered when Derek opened up an Old Irish one Stiles had been eyeing last time he’d been over.

“Oh, just go. I can read over your notes perfectly well without you.”

Stiles stood up so fast he had to catch his chair to keep it from falling over behind him. “Sorry,” he said, but he could tell by her eye roll that his grin negated most of his sincerity.

As Stiles drew near, Derek automatically shifted the stack of books next to him to the floor without a thought to clear a space for Stiles to sit. “Look,” he said, leaning back into Stiles as Stiles hooked his chin over Derek’s shoulder and wrapped his arms around his waist to see the book in his lap. “I’ve been meaning to show you this.”

Stiles spent the next forty-five minutes blissfully listening to Derek translate out loud and trading speculative theories back and forth about what some of the more colorful metaphors might have been referring to. When finally he took notice of his surroundings again, he caught Agnieszka watching them with a little smile that suddenly reminded him so forcefully of his mother he couldn’t breathe.

Derek looked over his shoulder at him in concern. “You all right?”

Stiles hid his face between Derek’s shoulderblades, blinking rapidly. “Yeah,” he said, voice muffled. “Just… feeling a lot today.”

Derek squeezed one of his hands and went back to reading. Stiles had known he would get it. Derek, after all, had been the one to catch him when he blacked out after the Nemeton, the one who was there when he woke up in a panic, convinced he’d missed some huge attack that the others had had to deal with without him, the one who was there when he woke screaming out of similar nightmares for the rest of the following week. They hadn’t been able to stay in Beacon Hills more than another day afterward, Stiles only having been able to manage so many days off from the diner on short notice (not to mention needing to go to class, though if high school in Beacon Hills had prepared him for anything, it was covering for missed classes; college, by comparison, had been a veritable vacation), but Derek had insisted Stiles stay with him for the rest of the week. “So you’ll be there if anything trips Agnieszka’s wards,” he’d said, but Stiles had seen the looks Derek and his dad exchanged as they’d been on their way out, and he really didn’t think that was the only reason. Not that he’d objected.

“The thing I hate the most,” Stiles said one night, staring at Derek’s ceiling in the dark, waiting for his heart rate to come back down so he might have any hope of sleeping again, “is that I tell myself all day that we did it, we won, and I feel _good_ about it, but then I fall asleep and it becomes vividly clear my brain doesn’t believe me.” He rolled onto his side, where he could catch the barest outline of Derek’s profile. “Am I ever going to be able to believe things can actually go right again?”

Derek stretched out his arm for Stiles to scoot over and use his shoulder as a pillow. Stiles let his hand rest on Derek’s chest, over his heart, trying to sync his own to the same steady rate. “After the fire,” Derek said slowly, “I kept dreaming that everyone had died, and I’d have to get up and check everyone’s bedroom before I could go back to sleep. For months. And that was bad, but the worst part was really how long it took me to ever trust anyone again. It took years before I accepted that someone might be interested in me for me, and not because they wanted something.” Stiles felt him shrug. “It takes as long as it takes. And in the meantime, there are days where everything gets turned up to eleven. Or at least that’s how it was for me.”

Apparently today was an eleven day. But right now, with his forehead pressed into Derek’s back and listening to Derek’s voice, the world felt like it was receding back to manageable levels.

When he raised his head again, Agnieszka caught his gaze and this time he managed to smile back.

***

The biggest change in Stiles’ life since returning from Beacon Hills was actually at the diner. So long to his days of getting his homework done while getting paid; they actually had late-night customers now. He’d just finished ringing someone up when the owner walked in. Stiles was so shocked, he froze in the act of handing over the receipt. He hadn’t seen her since the day he’d been hired.

“Stilinski.”

“Uh, yeah?”

“What did you do?”

Stiles blinked. “Nothing?”

Ms. Poole looked around pointedly, forcing Stiles to do the same. Derek’s pack was in their usual back booth, Erica in the middle of saying something to make Isaac squirm and Boyd roll his eyes. The kelpie sat in another booth, looking surprisingly at home amongst a group of other college students with funky, multicolored dreads. And now there were other people he’d seen around campus and mentally categorized as “other,” but adopted a live and let live approach toward, who he could now clearly identify as fae, other weres, some sort of siren singing along with the jukebox…

“I had to hire more waitstaff while you were gone, Stilinski. You did something.”

“I, uh, I guess my friends might have spread the word about how late we’re open?”

“Well, keep it up.” She turned and looked at him appraisingly. “I think you might be due for a raise.”

“Thank you?” He gave up on saying anything in this conversation that didn’t sound like a question.

She waved dismissively over her shoulder as she headed into the kitchen to terrorize more unsuspecting staff.

“Well, that sounded good,” Derek murmured in his ear, and he did _not_ jump as he turned to glare.

“Damn sneaky werewolves.”

Derek just grinned at him. “Got tomorrow off?”

“Yeah?”

“Want to stay over?”

“Yeah,” he said again, this time with more enthusiasm.

“Good. I’ll wait until you’re off.” He leaned across the counter to give Stiles a quick kiss before he made his way over to the pack.

“Hey, Stiles!” Erica called. “Come warm up our coffee!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's hoping I satisfactorily brought this back to a place of fluff!
> 
> Details that didn't make it into the story:  
> -How they're going to fix the ley lines running through Beacon Hills once Kira gets back from Japan: Stiles will link with Kira and use her power to make the lines visible, then manipulate them back into place. Lydia will listen until they sound "in tune."
> 
> -Over the summer, the highway between the two packs is going to see a lot of use. Isaac will be work with the Argents at their summer camp (which started as an archery camp, of course, but then Chris threw in some classes on tracking and survival skills and how to make a fire, and suddenly it was a whole thing.) Cora will keep finding reasons to visit Lydia, and vice versa. Scott will be invited to get advice on alpha things from Talia. Stiles will continue to get real magic instruction from Agnieszka, and Agnieszka will be invited to family dinners at the Stilinski house on a more regular basis. Malia will tentatively try to get to know her actual Hale relatives, though she'll probably never trust Peter. (But really, who would?) And Derek will argue that he can translate for his mother from anywhere, so what does it matter if he's at home or in Beacon Hills?
> 
> -And of course, if you noticed Erica mention that they know who they'll follow if the Hale pack ever needs to split, that was very intentional foreshadowing of the fact that Derek will move to Beacon Hills with Stiles after he graduates. The Hale pack is large enough, stable enough, and used to members traveling often enough that there's no problem with Derek deciding to make the move while still having Talia as his alpha. It's up to Erica, Boyd, and Isaac whether they want to join Scott's pack officially. For Scott's part, he welcomes more actual wolves into his exceedingly mixed pack. Talia had told him it might lend a bit more stability to the pack bonds, and more wolves officially in the territory can only be a good thing.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I am on [tumblr](https://rhysiana.tumblr.com/)! Feel free to come talk to me about this story or anything else.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Thicker Than Forget](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14976923) by [adara](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adara/pseuds/adara)




End file.
